Since we had Pentecost last week and I preached about that, some questions came up about the Holy Spirit. So that’s what I’ll be preaching on for the next few weeks. To get us started, here’s Holy Spirit, part 1.
Here is the automatically generated transcript.
The Learner’s Permit for the Holy Spirit
You get your driver’s license, right? You don’t just show up, and they throw you in a car and you start driving. You have to take a written test to get your permit. And for that written test, you get this book and you look at all of it. When you get ready to take that test, we’ve noticed this in all of our kids, you’re looking at the book to take the test and you start paying more attention in the car while driving. Until that point, the car is kind of like a bus; you just kind of get in it, and your parents drive you around. You don’t care about East or West, and you don’t care that there’s Belle Meade between Washington and Walnut, or Lincoln Ave. It’s in there, and it might even take you a while to realize all the presidents are in order south of Washington Ave. You don’t even pay attention to any of that stuff, right?
So, if somebody just sits down in a car and says, “Go ahead and drive. Go!” You’d be like, “There are all these weird controls in here!” Unless you play Mario Kart, then you’re going to know some things.
The Holy Spirit works a lot like that in churches, where they’ll talk about the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit this, and the Holy Spirit that. You might feel like these people in Acts who said, “We didn’t even know there was a Holy Spirit.” So, for this first week, we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about things about the Holy Spirit that don’t directly give us instruction and don’t directly tell us what to do about it. Then we’ll do that more next week; we will talk about our actual interaction with the Holy Spirit and those kinds of things. I don’t want to start there without getting our learner’s permit, right?
The Rule of First Mention: Genesis 1:1
Of course, since we’re going to talk about the Holy Spirit, we have to start in Genesis 1:1. We’re going to be all over the place today; we’re going to jump around a bunch. There is a Bible study concept—I don’t want to call it a rule or a law, more like a guideline—called the rule of first mention. This means whenever you’re studying something about the Bible, some concept or person or even a place, you look for where it’s first mentioned. Because where it’s first mentioned is kind of like your first impression, and every other time that thing is mentioned, you want to think about it and look at it in light of how it was first mentioned.
So if we’re talking about the Holy Spirit, we want to find the first place that the Holy Spirit is mentioned in the Bible so that everything else we think about the Holy Spirit and everything else we read about the Holy Spirit, we read in the context of that first mention, okay?
Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
So the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. The Spirit of God is here at the beginning. The Spirit of God is not the waters; the Spirit of God is hovering over the face of the waters. The waters are a created thing; they’re a thing that has matter and mass and atoms, if you want to get that crazy. But the Spirit does not. The Spirit is spiritual.
Understanding What a Spirit Is
So we already have to bring into this discussion that the Holy Spirit, and it sounds stupid, some of the stuff I’m going to say is just evident, right, but the Holy Spirit is a spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a solid, tangible, touchable, spatial thing. This one book I read about the Holy Spirit was really great. Anything that you have in matter, this guy described, he was like, “Before we even talk about the Holy Spirit, we have to talk about what a spirit is.” I was like, “Oh, this is really breaking things down.”
To be a spirit is to be spiritual, is to not have qualities or characteristics of material things. So material things can be touched. You can cut them up. They can be made into smaller pieces. You can have part of it over here and part of it over there, but none of it over here. Spirit doesn’t work that way. There are no pieces of it. You can’t have half of a spirit or a fourth of a spirit. And when it comes to God’s Spirit, His Spirit is everywhere, which means that part of it can’t be here, and all of it’s over here, but not here, but it’s there. He is hovering over the waters in the beginning. So in the beginning, he is over everything. From here on out, from Genesis 1:2 onward, everything that’s created, the Holy Spirit is over it.
Genesis and the Divine Gaze
A couple of things about the Book of Genesis, and you might get into a fight if you just say this on Facebook without discussing it: The Book of Genesis isn’t a science book. There’s not a place we could go, according to Genesis 1:2, and be like, “Oh, it says here God’s Spirit was hovering over the face of the waters. Let’s go find those waters.” It’s not like that. But it says His face was hovering over the waters. His face was hovering over everything. The very next thing that’s going to happen is the waters are going to get separated, and everything is going to get created, and everything’s going to get created by God underneath this… this area. Nope, I mean, we want to say area because now I’m getting material. Isn’t this hard to say? Everything that’s created is under the Holy Spirit. Everything is under His view, under His gaze, under His face. He’s watching it. He is seeing it all.
God’s Self-Limitation for Creation
Ancient rabbis talked about that in order for God to make the world and creation, He had to make a place where He wasn’t. Because He’s not in the trees, He’s not in the rivers. That’s paganism, right? He’s not in this rock. He is uncreated. He is spirit. So He had to reduce Himself and make Himself a little bit smaller to make room for the universe to be created. And then with the created universe, He can freely enter it whenever He wants. But He is not the universe because the universe is material and created things, and God is a spirit.
I do not do drugs. This all sounds far out and cosmic and trippy and weird. It is mind-boggling, okay? It’s awesome to sit—maybe we’ll do this on the canoe trip—sit and look at the stars and look at the whole universe and to think about 600 years before Jesus, the rabbis were studying the books of Moses, and they deduced that God had to limit Himself and submit Himself and hold Himself back a little bit so that the universe would have room in all the greatness of who He is to be created, so that He could enter it and show His character to His creation. Wow.
So, spirit, everybody clear? We got it. We got all that nailed down, right? What a spirit is, not material. Good. Great.
The Holy Spirit in the Old Testament
Throughout the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit will come up over and over and over again, and it doesn’t use the phrase “the Holy Spirit.” It will use the phrase “God’s Spirit.” Because of the nature of the Trinity, we have God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and they are the same. But there are places where even in the Old Testament, we start to see the nature of them actually being three different persons of one being. And if you thought it was far out to talk about spirit and material things and the universe being the material thing that God shrunk Himself so that He could create, it gets even more far out when we start talking about one person, one being with three persons and all of that. We might get a little bit in there, but maybe not.
The Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge
So you fast forward. God makes a garden. He puts a tree in the garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. And Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they’re supposed to take care of it. They eat from it, which is a rebellion against God, the Creator and the Giver of Life.
And at the end of Genesis 2 or 3—oh, I didn’t write down. Yep, in Genesis 3:22, “The Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in his knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.'” So, God says we can’t have man knowing good and evil and eating from the Tree of Life. We can’t have that. Why can’t He have that?
Let’s go back to driver’s ed. When you get your license, the very first thing we do is we don’t say, “Here’s your driver’s license and your new Porsche. Go for it.” You have no control. You have no idea how that works. I forfeited my license because I didn’t want to pay for insurance when I was in high school, and then I didn’t get my license back again until I was 22 and out of college and ready to pay for it. Went into the BMV. I said, “Hi, I’m here to get my license.” And they looked it up, and they’re like, “Okay, here you go,” and they printed it out and handed it to me. I had not driven a car for six years. I had not driven a car for six years. When I had driven a car, I was 16. I walked over to Kenny Kent—you guys, why?—because they didn’t have a car. I said, “Yeah, I’d like to look at just a cheap used. I need a really cheap used car.” Didn’t tell him I just got my license half an hour ago. They’re like, “Okay, how about this one? We’ll take it for a test drive.” He gets all the things. Dude gets in the car, hands me the keys. It’s been six years. I have no idea. I have not been playing Mario Kart to keep fresh on it. Get in the car. I did the whole starter thing where you hold the key too long, and it does that. Like, “Okay, it starts. Good.” I’m trying to play it off. I don’t know what the salesman was doing. I stuck it in reverse, and I hit the gas, okay? Driver’s ed, you don’t have to hit the gas when you’re in reverse, right? The idle is enough for it. We went backwards. I stuck it in drive. I did not know what I was doing. I was out of control.
What does this have to do with anything? Adam and Eve having full power of the Tree of Life and the knowledge of good and evil, but not what was good and evil. They knew some things are good and some things are bad. But they didn’t have the wisdom to know what the difference was. They could not have the Tree of Life and have access to endless life with no repercussions for doing what’s bad. Does that make sense? If I do something bad and I hurt myself, I learn, “Oh, I should not do that again.” If I do something bad and nothing comes of it, I don’t learn, and I will keep doing it, and I will keep doing it. And if I enjoy it, I will keep doing it, right? If I do something good, and something good happens, I will keep on doing it. But if I do something good, let’s say I do something really selfless and I don’t get any reward for it, I do something really good and I don’t get any gratification from it, am I going to keep doing that good thing? Probably not.
And so here’s Adam and Eve. They know to decide things are good or evil, but they don’t know what’s good, and they don’t know what’s evil. They cannot also have no repercussions, no justice, no play out, and just live forever out of control. Right? And so God takes that away from them. You guys, the ancient rabbis, they taught, they still teach, that someday Adam and Eve would move from the knowledge of good and evil to get such wisdom that they would know what is good, that they would learn what is good from God so that they would just want to do good all the time. And out of that desire to do good all the time, God would let them eat from the Tree of Life, and they would do good forever with God. Just sit there on a shelf somewhere, hold on to that.
The Spirit on Kings and the Departure of the Spirit
So then Cain and Abel happened, all kinds of disaster, evil, evil, evil. People know how to do good and evil. People don’t do good; they just do evil. And you have the whole book of Genesis. It goes on and on. The Holy Spirit does come up some more times. Joshua is picked because the Holy Spirit is on him. It says that Moses had the Spirit of the Lord. We know that King Saul, he became king, and there are a couple of times that the Spirit of God came upon him, and he prophesied, or he sang, and he spoke like the prophets, and everybody said, “Wow, Saul is also with one of the prophets.”
But then we read that when King David gets anointed as king—nobody knows about it, it’s at his house out in the country—the Spirit of God left Saul, and an evil spirit came to torment him. This is one of the first introductions of the Holy Spirit leaving somebody out of punishment. The Holy Spirit is with them. They are being led by the Lord. They do something wrong. The Holy Spirit leaves, and they’re turned over. They’re turned over, and it says the Holy Spirit, a spirit, an evil spirit from God came and tormented him.
Okay, now you got to rewind, and then all of a sudden, we might have some problems. Every spirit was created by God. It says in Psalms that God created His servants, created His messengers to be like flames and wind. They’re temporary. They exist for His purposes, but none of them was created without Him. Jesus would say at one point that He saw Satan fall from heaven, and a third of the angels went with him. The Book of Revelation talks about the evil serpent swung his tail and knocked a third of the hosts of heaven, which are angels or spirits, knocked a third of them out of heaven, down to the earth with him. So there are evil spirits. There are, there is a good Spirit. The Bible talks about evil spirits, plural. When the Bible talks about the Spirit of God, there’s only one. There are not multiple. So the Bible talks about angels and angels of God. We’re there, man, and we need to do that on the fourth week. Talk about angels in the fourth week. They are servants, the angels of God are servants of God, but they are, and sometimes they have the authority of His Spirit, but they are separate and distinct. They are not God’s Spirit.
So God’s Spirit is on Saul to help him and empower him and to guide him. And then when His Spirit leaves, another spirit comes and takes His place to do all of the opposite of that. It does not empower him. It weakens him. It does not give him wisdom. It makes him act foolishly. Some people say that riches and wealth just amplify who you are. Like if you really want to see the full power of my laziness, give me a million dollars, and I will unleash my full laziness into the world, right? It would amplify me.
God does not force Himself upon anybody. But His Spirit empowers and strengthens us to do His will, and when His Spirit was taken away from Saul, another spirit came to empower Saul to do his own will. That was why judgment came on Saul in the first place. This is why judgment came on Adam and Eve in the first place. They chose to do their own will, and so God took His Spirit away, and another spirit came to help them do their own will.
So then the Holy Spirit comes on David, and the Spirit is on David, and it empowers David. And there are all kinds of great things that help David do. But it also allows him to sin with Bathsheba and to kill Uriah the Hittite. And so then you start to question, okay, the Spirit has power, and it empowers, but it also is not a force against your will. The Holy Spirit is not going to make you do something you don’t want. I really have been there when somebody said, “I don’t know if I want to become a Christian or not. I don’t know if I want to hear from the Lord or not. What if He sends me to Africa? What if He sends me off to some terrible place?” And that person has not heard the gospel correctly. Because God’s not going to force you to do anything that He won’t put a desire for you to do in your heart. And if there’s a desire in your heart to do something evil, it didn’t come from God. There’s just a lot more complexity that we don’t have to be afraid that God is going to send us off to Timbuktu.
So the Holy Spirit empowers, strengthens, and helps you to be who God created you to be.
The Prophecy of Isaiah 11: The Spirit on the Messiah
When the Holy Spirit came in, but we’re still in the Old Testament, so we’re going to stick to Old Testament words. There’s this wild thing that comes up in Isaiah 11. Isaiah is prophesying. He says, “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse.” You know, I hacked down all these invasive burning bushes, and I cut them down. In three weeks later, there are all kinds of shoots bursting out of them growing, and I saw those, and I was like, “It’s the root! It’s the shoot from the stump of Jesse!” Like this is unstoppable. Like, how many chemicals do I have to pour on this thing to stop it? These were agrarians. They knew, they knew this. “A branch from his roots will bear fruit, and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.”
Isaiah knows he’s talking about the chosen one of God that’s going to come, the Son of God, descended from David. This is hundreds of years after David. This is hundreds of years before Jesus would be born. He knows the Messiah is coming, and when the Messiah comes, the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. There is some sort of difference between the Messiah and the chosen one, the Immanuel, God with us, and the Spirit. Because the Spirit is going to rest on him like they’re two separate things, does that make sense? So he’s starting to talk about, he’s starting to use Trinity kind of language, that the Spirit is this other, is this spiritual thing. That’s the Spirit. That’s kind of stupid thing to say. The Spirit is a spirit, and it’s going to rest on this material, physical thing that is the Son of God.
Here’s a description of God’s Holy Spirit from Isaiah 11:
“The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he will judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”
So the Spirit is the Spirit. It’s going to be on this man who is a man, physical, material, and it’s going to, the Spirit is going to empower the man. And here are all the great things the man is going to do, empowered by the Spirit. It goes on. Isaiah 11 is awesome. You could read the whole thing. It’s just how this man is going to bring in everybody and draw everybody to God by the power of the Spirit that’s on him.
At the very end, it goes into Isaiah 12:
“You will say in that day: ‘I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, that you might comfort me. Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.'”
That salvation, is it coming from God? Is it coming from the man sent by God who’s equal to God? Is that salvation from the Spirit that’s on the man that was sent from God? Exactly. This is God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit are all participating in your salvation. They’re all working at it together.
John the Baptist: Baptism of Spirit and Fire
All right, now we’re going to skip ahead. This guy, John the Baptist. If you were a Gentile, you were born in Kansas, and you decide that you want to follow Yahweh, and you’re all grown up, they say you have to be born again. You have to have a rebirth and be born as a Jewish person. And the way we’re going to do that is you’re going to get circumcised and you’re going to take a bath. And you’re going to go into this water, and you’re going to be cleansed of all of your Kansas Gentile, not Jewish past and all of your idolatry. And when you come out of that water, you’re going to be clean and new Jewish person, God’s chosen people, the follower of Yahweh.
And so when John the Baptist is out in the wilderness, and he’s at the Jordan River, and people are coming, they are repenting, and they are saying, “Gosh, I have lived like a Gentile. Already got circumcised as a kid. We handled that. But I’ve been living like a Gentile, and I want to be washed clean in this water. I want to be baptized. And so when I come out of the water, I will be Jewish. I will be God’s chosen people.” And so they come. Many of them were coming. John the Baptist yells at them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath?” He kind of yells at them, “The axe is laid at the root.”
Then he says, “I baptize with water for repentance.” I’m baptizing you here to symbolize the bath the Gentiles take when they go from being Gentile to Jewish. It’s a baptism of repentance. That’s what I’m doing here. “But he who is coming is mightier than I. I’m not even worthy to carry his shoes. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
So there’s a bunch of people that read that and stop. And they say, “Oh, the Holy Spirit fire. He’s going to baptize me with the Holy Spirit fire.” Remember, John is baptizing with water. He says, “There’s one that’s coming that’s going to baptize you.” Just like I’m taking people and dipping them in water. There is one who is coming, who’s going to take people and dip them in the Holy Spirit and in fire. So explain the fire to me, John.
The very next sentence, he explains the fire: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
The one who’s coming is bringing the Holy Spirit, which is salvation that we just talked about in Isaiah 11. And he’s bringing fire, which is judgment, which is not salvation. So all of these people, if they had dealt with wheat, which a lot of them had, you would have a winnowing fork, and you go out like on a hillside where the wind is always, you know, you go down by the riverfront, and the wind is always blowing down there. You go to a hilltop with your wheat, and you shake it with your winnowing fork. And all the little husks of the wheat get blown up in the air, and they blow over here, and they land over here in a pile, and all the wheat falls right here. And that chaff is what that’s called, all the stuff that came off of the wheat. All of that is real fine, and it’s kind of, it’s like mowed grass. It’s just husks. It’s just peels, right, of wheat. It burns really easily. You can use it for a fire starter. It’s like dried up pine needles. I mean, it’s just. And it burns up, and it’s gone. But it burns up so fast you can’t get warm off of it. You can’t cook any food over it. It is worthless. It’s not good. You have to have that in mind in the context. When John the Baptist says the one that’s coming after me will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. Judgment is coming, and it’s either going to be for you in the form of salvation.
Baptism in the Holy Spirit
Baptism in the Holy Spirit, he’s going to take you. How does baptism and fire happen in that context? It doesn’t mean he’s going to sprinkle fire on your head. It means you’re going to be consumed, and you’re not going to exist anymore because you’re going to be completely covered in fire like that chaff. So reverse engineer it, how are we going to be baptized in the Holy Spirit? We’re going to be completely immersed in the Holy Spirit. We’re going to be completely consumed by the Holy Spirit, and that is salvation. That is Isaiah 11: wisdom, understanding, deciding truths by righteousness, and not just by what you hear or just by the line that you read on Facebook, judging with wisdom. That’s what the Holy Spirit is going to bring.
Asking for the Holy Spirit: Jesus’ Teaching on Prayer
All right. Later on, Jesus, they asked Jesus, “How do we pray?” I barely made it through the Lord’s Prayer today, you guys. I listen to you guys, and I follow along because I get so distracted, and I just want to get, and especially this week, because I’ve been reading. The disciples ask Jesus, all this stuff happens, and Jesus is praying, and prayers are getting answered, and miracles are happening, and power, and all of this great stuff. And they say, “Wow, Jesus, you are so powerful. Teach us how to pray like you pray.” And His answer is the Lord’s Prayer, and Luke 11, you get a little abbreviated version of it.
He’s praying in a certain place. When He finished, His disciples said, “Teach us how to pray. John taught all his disciples how to pray. You teach us how to pray.” And He says, “When you pray, say, ‘Father, holy is your name, your Kingdom come, give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who’s indebted to us. Lead us not into temptation.'” He gives that, but then He gives a parable. Okay, but that’s how you pray. But now, let me tell you how to pray, right? Back to driver’s ed. I can tell you what the pedals do; I can tell you what the wheel does. But if I don’t teach you how to drive kindly and considerately for all the people around you and the people riding with you in your car, nobody is going to like you. Nobody ever wants to ride in your car if you drive like a maniac. So I can teach you how to drive, but then I have to teach you how to drive right?
So Jesus, teach us how to pray. Here are some words that you can say. But now let me teach you how to pray. “Which of you, as a friend, will go with him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread,’ banging on your door. ‘I need some bread. My neighbor’s here. Some visitors came. It’s Father’s Day, and I don’t have a cake. I need to borrow something.'” He says, “Even though they won’t get up and help the person because they’re their friend, or because it’s important, or it’s because it’s Father’s Day and there’s no cake, but because the person was so stinking persistent and annoying, they finally get up out of their bed and help.” And that’s how you should pray. Just annoy the heck out of God. Bang on that door. Wear Him out. Yep, I said that.
But then, He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, instead of a fish, will give him a snake?” I might do that to you, because that would be really funny. But not really, not sincerely. “If he asks for an egg, who will give him a scorpion? If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”
Receiving the Fullness of God
Wait. I thought we were talking about prayer. I didn’t know we were talking about the Holy Spirit. Jesus just flipped the whole conversation about prayer on its head. Because whatever you’re praying for is great, and God loves you. But you know what would be a better thing to give you than whatever it is you’re praying for? A better thing to give you would be the Holy Spirit. Jesus is saying, more than any of you know, all the disciples are watching Jesus, and they’re like, “You are so powerful. Tell us how to pray and have that power.” Jesus says, “You know what’s better than all of this power is to just have the Holy Spirit.”
And so that puts us in a spot where we’ve been given a promise by Jesus that God desires for us to have the Holy Spirit. There is no, He doesn’t list in here any laws. He doesn’t list in here anything that you have to do. You have to ask. You have to knock. You have to seek. And He loves it. He wants to give us the Holy Spirit so bad. And He even says later on in Ephesians, and we’ll talk about this next week, that you receive the Holy Spirit as soon as you believe, just believing, just believing that little, you know, “I wonder if Jesus might be right.” Boom.
And then if you have, do you have a little portion of the Holy Spirit? Do you have a little section cut off of the Holy Spirit because there can be more of the Holy Spirit over here than there is over there? Oh, wait, no, there can’t be. It’s spiritual. If you have the Holy Spirit, which you have because you believe Jesus, what Jesus said is true, He sends the Holy Spirit in your seal. Then you have 100% of God. 100% of the Holy Spirit. You only have 100% of the Holy Spirit. I remember when I first got saved. There are all kinds of days. I’d hear some preacher and be like, “I wonder if I’m not saved. I wonder if I didn’t say it right. I wonder if I didn’t do it right. Oh, I just sinned. Oh, I wonder if if now I’ve messed everything up.” It’s all lies. When you receive the Holy Spirit, you receive the Holy Spirit. You might not even know it because you were told that you believed, right? You were told that you asked Jesus into your heart. We have all kinds of words in our language for this. You might not even know when it happened. But then you are sealed with the Holy Spirit. You have the fullness of God dwelling in you, and you are actually made into a new creature, a new creation, and that’s what we’re going to talk about next week.
Closing Prayer
Lord, thank you so much for remaking us, for putting your Holy Spirit in us, and giving us a new life to live. A new everlasting life that we can walk out and do and participate in. Lord, I pray that you would do it. I pray that you would show us how to do that, that as we pray this week, “Give me your Holy Spirit,” Lord, that you would just fill us up and help us to see that your Holy Spirit is with us and near to us and guiding us and helping us in every way. We love you, and we praise you, Lord. Amen.
