Reformed Baptist Church in O'Fallon, Missouri
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The Holy Spirit: Our Need His Supply.

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

Opening

Heavenly Father, we thank You that You allow us, in this very hostile environment that we live in, to gather freely, to study Your Word, to worship You. Lord, we acknowledge as we come before You our complete and utter need for Your Holy Spirit to guide us, to illuminate us, to draw us and reveal to us Jesus. We ask that today He would be present, that we would be open in our hearts to whatever He has to say to each of us individually and to our body corporately. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. We pray in Your name, Amen.

The title of my sermon today is “The Holy Spirit: Our Need and His Supply.”

Our Need

What is our need? Well, if you haven’t noticed, our culture is going to hell in a handbasket. But it’s not just the culture. The problem with the culture in America is that the church has failed, and the church is failing. When I say church, I don’t mean the liberal church. The liberal church is over the cliff. The liberal church went over the cliff in the early 1900s. I’m talking about the evangelical church. In our day, what we’re seeing is a great apostasy from the Word of God. Even in professing churches, we have all sorts of heresy. For example, we have female pastors and bishops. We have gay pastors and bishops now. We have gender confusion. We have support for abortion on demand. We have support for Marxism. We have support and acceptance of CRT, Critical Race Theory, and many other things of that nature. It’s called going woke, right? You’ve heard the phrase “going woke.” But it’s actually worse than that, because even in our Bible churches, 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce, 50% of women seeking abortion claim to be Christian, 80% of Christian men use pornography, and 40% of Christian women, 25% of Christian youth are fornicating, and on and on it goes. And that doesn’t include the common sins. Those are the gross ones. I mean the common sins that are so prevalent in our churches today, like gossip, or gluttony, or bitterness, or vanity and pride, and so many other works of the flesh. That is our problem, that is our need. We need an outpouring of the Holy Ghost, amen.

We don’t need more Christian religion. The world doesn’t need our religion. The world needs Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ is made known through the working and ministry of the Holy Spirit. The solution to the corruption and decay around us is the ministry and the fullness of the Holy Spirit, because nothing else will do. Not another program, not another campaign, that’s not going to do it. Not another slideshow, that’s not going to do it. Not another conference, that’s not going to do it. What’s going to do it is the reality of Jesus Christ as manifested through the power of the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit can replace a heart of stone with a soft heart of flesh. Only the Holy Spirit can breathe life into Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. Only the Holy Spirit can transform a human soul into the image of Jesus Christ. Only the Holy Spirit can create the church, sustain the church, and empower the church for witness and warfare. And as we will see, that is why the Spirit has been given to the church.

Now, I’m not going to look at everything the Spirit does, all of His ministry. That would take weeks and weeks and weeks. I’m just going to mention a few things that I think are important.

Regeneration

Foundational to the work of the Spirit is the work of regeneration. Regeneration is just the theological word for what? Being born again, the new birth. Jesus said in John chapter 3 that in order to see the kingdom of God or to enter the kingdom of God, you must be born again. Foundational, right? Yet I’ve been to Christmas services and other services at different churches, and there is no gospel presentation. There is no invitation to accept Jesus as Savior and Lord. The reason the church is failing currently is because we have both a pulpit and a pew with unregenerate men and women. They are not born again.

I remember when I first got saved, after I first got saved, I started reading from the Puritan writers. And I read over and over, these guys would say, the great need of the church is a regenerate pastorate, that we have men in the pulpit who are truly born of God’s Spirit. I thought, why would anybody want to be a pastor if they weren’t born again? I mean, it baffled me, because I was in a Bible-believing church, and the pastor was born again, and most of the people were born again, from what you could tell. The thought of unregenerate Christianity was just an odd thing to me. And then I remember talking to a guy whose dad was a liberal Presbyterian pastor, who didn’t believe in the Trinity, the deity of Jesus Christ, His penal substitution, or His bodily resurrection, or His ultimate return. I said, well, that must make Easter kind of awkward. I said, what does he say on Easter? He says, well, you know, it’s like the resurrection is a Christian myth developed to inspire hope. It’s about hope. The human spirit rising up. This kind of gobbledygook, right? But it’s true. We need a regenerate pastorate. Regenerate men don’t endorse trans ideology. Regenerate men don’t celebrate abortion from the pulpit. They just don’t do that. But we’re seeing this not only in the liberal churches, what are called liberal, but even now, in evangelical churches, we’re seeing a lot of movement in this direction.

Now you might think I’m being judgmental, but Jesus gave us a very simple rule for evaluating things. Matthew 7, if you want to turn there. You don’t always have to turn when I go to a text, that’s entirely up to you. In Matthew 7, Jesus says this, starting in verse 15. He says, “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” Now, how do we know whether we’re looking at a real sheep or we’re looking at a wolf that’s dressed in sheep’s clothing? How do we know? We don’t know their hearts, right? We do not know anybody’s heart. But that’s not what Jesus—Jesus gave us a principle for evaluation. And He never said, you can know their heart, but He said, you can know something else about them. And what is that? He says in verse 16, “You will know them by their fruits.” What are they producing? What are they preaching? How are they living, et cetera? You know them by their fruits. And much of what we’re seeing today in our churches, both in the pulpit and the pew, is clearly described in Galatians 5 as the works of the flesh, not the fruit of the Spirit. We know by what is produced, not what is deep hidden away in one’s good heart.

A dead soul must be quickened to new life. That is the new birth. In Ephesians 2, Paul says this, starting in verse 1:

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

(Ephesians 2:1–10)

Your soul was dead. Your soul was cut off from the life of God. Some of you today may be there. I don’t understand why people go to church that aren’t born again. I don’t understand why pastors want to be pastors if they’re not born again. But some people like religion. They find certain comfort in it. Maybe they find some basic principles for life in it. I don’t know. But I know this, that if you are not born again, you will not enter the kingdom of God. It doesn’t matter how much you go to church, how much you read your Bible, how much you give, those things will not get you into the kingdom of God. Jesus said you must be born again. That means the Holy Spirit of God must come into your soul and quicken your soul and make it alive unto God. It is a work of God through the Holy Spirit. “But God”—amen? “But God, who is rich in mercy.” The first step in the Christian life and the first step in the renewal of the church is that we preach again the clear gospel of Jesus Christ, His penal substitution, He died for our sins, He was buried, He was risen from the dead, and is now ascended and seated next to the Father in glory. Amen.

Union with Christ and Sanctification

And this regeneration produces my second point of the Spirit’s work, and that is union with Jesus. This is the effect, the result of the Holy Spirit entering and giving eternal life to the soul. Eternal life is not just something we get after we die. It’s not just the eternal state that we enter into after we die. Eternal life is the life of God. It is zoe life. It enters the soul. And when the Spirit comes into the believer, the Spirit imparts this life, and now we are transferred out of the kingdom of darkness and placed into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. That’s Colossians 1. So we are no longer in the world, if you will. We’re no longer in Adam. We are in Jesus Christ. That means that we are set apart. That’s what the word sanctified means on the most basic level, to be set apart. So we are taken out of the world, we are placed in Christ, and so now we are saints. Same word for sanctification, same root word. We are now set apart from the world. Now, you can be a backslidden Christian and you can look like the world and you can kind of act like the world, but if you’re truly in Christ Jesus, God sees you as in Christ and you are set apart. That is a positional reality for all those who are truly born again.

But then there’s the subjective work. What I mean by that is sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit whereby He transforms us. Ultimately, what it means is He transforms us and makes us holy. By the way, the Holy Spirit is called the Holy Spirit, not just because He is holy, but because He makes us holy. He makes us holy. That’s one of the main things He does in us. And holiness isn’t some clinical thing. It’s not a white coat. Holiness is transformation of the soul into the image of Jesus Christ. That’s what holiness is. To be like Jesus. [audio unclear] and behavior. That’s what He does.

Romans 8:1, excuse me. The book of Romans is interesting if you read it. The Holy Spirit’s only mentioned one time in the first seven chapters, but it’s mentioned 18 times afterwards. Romans 8:1: “Therefore there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Did you hear that? How much condemnation, if you’re born again, how much condemnation do you have? None, zero. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.” Jesus not only satisfied the requirement of the law on the cross, which He did, but also now, through the work of the Spirit in us, the righteousness of the law is now produced within us. [audio unclear] which is often translated in newer versions, “a people of His own possession.” Because He has bought us, He has redeemed us, He has sealed us with His Holy Spirit, and we are now owned by Him, and the Spirit of God is transforming us into the image of Jesus Christ. And so He’s the one that produces the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. And we’re going to look at Galatians 5 a little bit later. He produces it; we don’t produce it, He produces it. We don’t make ourselves like Jesus. The Spirit makes us like Jesus. It’s His work to do that.

Fellowship and the Knowledge of Jesus

Next, the Spirit works to grant us fellowship and the knowledge of Jesus Christ Himself. John 14, verse 15. It’s a well-known passage. By the way, I’m reading the New King James. You may be reading ESV or NIV or whatever, so you’ll see a little differences. I’m not going to stop and make a bunch of critical comments on the text. John 14:15: “If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper,” or Comforter. No, I do need to make one critical comment here—critical means textual criticism. The word here, Helper—King James said Comforter. I don’t know what yours says. Anybody got an ESV? Counselor? Counsel, that’s good, too. The way that this word Comforter got stuck in the Bible was, I think, Tyndale in his translation. And at the time that that translation was made, the word comforter, which many new versions translate as helper—actually, when we think of consolation, right? Like I’m bummed out, I need some comfort. If I grab a bag of chips, you know, that kind of thing. Comfort, comfort food. But that’s not what the word meant when he put it in there. That was maybe a secondary or tertiary meaning. The word really meant one who empowers. One who strengthens, so comfort was strength. And only secondarily was the idea of comfort there. So God has given us an Empowerer. I love that. Right? Isn’t that what we need? Yeah, there are times of deep sorrow in the Christian life. And we do need comfort, and the Holy Spirit provides that too. But first and foremost, Jesus is giving us the power to live for Him.

The power. But also He doesn’t just empower us to live, He empowers us to know. He empowers us to know. “The Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.” Now notice here, He doesn’t say to them, “and He is in you,” because at this time in His ministry, the apostles did not have the Holy Spirit in them. He was with them. Jesus sent them out, and they worked miracles. They cast out demons. They healed people by the power of the Spirit. He was on them. He was among them, but He wasn’t in them. When did that happen? Say it loud. You’re exactly right, Pentecost. That’s why when Jesus in Acts 1:8 was talking to them, His final discourse, He says, wait, wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit to come upon you in power. And so they waited, they tarried, they prayed. And then we know on the day of Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out in power.

So Jesus says, “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” Now, He’s just said, I’m leaving and I’m sending the Spirit. In other words, I’m leaving and He, another Helper, another Comforter, another Empowerer, He will come. But then He says, I won’t leave you orphans, I will come. Well, which is it? The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus Christ. So when the Spirit comes to the believer, Jesus also indwells that believer. “I will come to you. A little while longer and the world will see Me no more, but you will see Me. Because I live, you will live also. At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” At that day, at Pentecost, the Spirit was given to them now to be in them, and that’s when they were in the Father and in the Son.

He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him. Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord, how is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.”

(John 14:21–23)

Wow. Father, Son, and Spirit making their abode, abiding in the believer and in the church. Wow. Now that’s what the world needs to see. Amen. “These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper,” or the Empowerer, “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” And then in John 16, Jesus says in verse 13, “However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me.”

So it is the Spirit of God that really enables us to have a real relationship with Jesus Christ. He’s the one that reveals to us the riches of Jesus as our Savior. You’ve heard the phrase, I’m sure it is, that we don’t need more religion, right? We don’t need more religion, we need more Jesus. And that experiential, or as the Puritans called it, the experimental knowledge of Jesus Christ comes through the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s soul. So we truly can fellowship with Jesus Christ and through Him with the Father because we have the Holy Spirit. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s not just that we study the Bible and find out different attributes about Jesus, or we learn different things about the work of Jesus, or just study the names of Jesus. We can know Jesus. The living, resurrected and ascended Lord, seated on a throne in heaven, yet through His Spirit, present in His church and present in the hearts of the believer. We can know Him.

Power and Gifts for Service

So the Spirit reveals Jesus to us, but also the Spirit provides power and gifts for service. I’ve already referred to Acts 1:8, where Jesus told them to wait because they were about to begin their missionary ministry, if you will, of proclaiming the gospel. He says, wait, because you need power to do this. You can’t do it on your own. You can fabricate religion on your own, but you cannot fulfill the Great Commission on your own. You can’t lead a soul to Jesus Christ if the Holy Spirit is not working through you. I need more amens on that. You’ve heard Pastor Mike talk about outreach recently and some goals that he has for outreach. Well, I can assure you, friends, if we don’t get full of the Holy Ghost, it’s not going to come to pass. The Holy Spirit has got to be working through us because only He can save a soul.

I won’t take time to read through 1 Corinthians 12 where it talks about the gifting of the Spirit, but the point is very simple. The Holy Spirit was given to us to regenerate us, to give us union with Jesus, to reveal Jesus, to sanctify us from sin, to produce fruit in our lives. But lastly, He grants us His power for ministry and warfare. The warfare is real. And it’s not just out there. It’s down here too. You don’t have people cutting up children to make them an opposite gender unless there’s something demonic going on. You don’t have a society killing millions of babies a year unless something demonic is going on. So the warfare isn’t just happening out there. It’s happening all around us. It happens in our own minds when we feel tempted or when we’re thinking in an unbiblical way, we’re being attacked. It’s very real, and we need the power not just to persevere, but the power to overcome the enemy.

So much more could be said about the Spirit if we had time about His work, but the point is very simple. Jesus said in John 15, which follows right on the heels of all that He said about the Holy Spirit being given, “Without Me, you can do nothing.” I wish He would have said, “Without Me, you can build religion.” That would have been great. But “you can do nothing” means, in that context, you cannot produce real fruit. We can produce fake fruit, religious fruit, socially acceptable fruit, but that’s not what we want, right? No, we want the fruit of the Spirit. We abide in Jesus only through the work of the Spirit in our lives. It’s the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, through whom we are enabled to know and to experience the riches of Jesus Christ. It includes the power that He grants the believer not only for personal victory but for victory in witness and warfare. We are called to win the war. We’re called to win, not just to fight, we’re called to win.

You know, it talks in Ephesians 6 about wrestling with spiritual powers, and I like to use an illustration. I never wrestled in high school. Anybody here wrestle in high school? Any wrestlers? No? That’s one? So I don’t know anything about the techniques on that. But I know this, if you’re on the bottom, it’s not good news. I think that’s correct, right? In wrestling? So we’re in a fight, and the fight never ends. The warfare doesn’t end. As I like to say, Satan doesn’t take a Sabbath. He’s right here, or his minions are. They want to invade your mind right now, and maybe some evil spirits are. They don’t want you to hear. They don’t want you to see. They don’t want you to love Jesus. They don’t want your heart open to the Holy Ghost. They don’t want that. So it’s a constant battle. So we’re always fighting and always wrestling, but that doesn’t mean that we are fighting from the bottom. We fight from the top. We’re seated in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. We’re fighting from the top. You fight as a winner. You got to hold them down, but you’re winning. And that is what we’re called to do.

You might be saying, well, gee, what about early Christians getting martyred? They didn’t win. Oh no, they won. They won. The early church was so eager to die for Jesus that the leadership of the church had to tell their churches, calm down. Stop trying to be a martyr. And what do we do? Well, if somebody gives us a bad look, we shrink away in fear. That’s not victory, man. We need to regain a little bit of that martyr spirit, if you will. The willingness to suffer loss for Jesus and His cause, amen? Real loss, a job loss, a promotion. You know, C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time, right? All these apologetic books and fiction books and now movies and all this. He never, in the academic world, when he was a real scholar, was given the position that he really deserved because of his Christian faith. He lost what was really rightfully his. If you speak up at work, you might not get that raise. Will you speak up or will you be fearful? You might even lose your job. We’re getting to the point now, friends, where with what’s called woke capital, corporations getting woke, that we’re seeing a purge. And I think we’ll continue to see for some time more and more Christians lose their job if they speak up and identify as a Christian. And the question before us is, will we be faithful to Jesus Christ or not? And I can tell you this: we will not be if we are not filled with God’s Spirit. We will not be. This is an absolute necessity, not an option, for the Christian.

Grieve Not, Quench Not

So what do we do? I’ll make a few practical points here. What’s the answer to the sermon? It just so happens that in the New Testament there are five exhortations—you can call them teaching, you can call them commands in some cases because they are imperative—regarding the Holy Spirit, the believer and the Holy Spirit. Two of them are negative, three of them positive. I want to review these quickly, and then I’ll let you go home.

The two negative ones are, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit,” which is Ephesians 4, and “Quench not the Holy Spirit,” which is 1 Thessalonians 5. These are negative, they are prohibitions. In other words, don’t do this, or stop doing this, depending on the verb tense. What does that mean to grieve the Holy Spirit? It means to cause Him pain. It’s really that simple. But how is it that we cause Him pain? Well, if you go to Ephesians 4, what we see is—where do I start? Verse 27 of chapter 4:

nor give place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

(Ephesians 4:27–32)

We grieve the Holy Spirit when we hold on to sin. And he lists sin here, but I don’t think this is an exhaustive list. I think this is a list that the Ephesian church itself needed to hear. Now what’s interesting, he says, let bitterness, wrath, etc., be put away from you. Well, who’s putting it away from you? Who’s putting it away? Are you putting it away? He says, let it be put away from you. Who’s putting the sin away from you? The Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is working in your life to remove these sins from your heart. And so when he says do not, do not resist what the Holy Spirit is doing in you, because you cause Him pain by doing that. It’s not just a call for us to put these things away, although we have a part like that. But this is rather, let the Holy Spirit do His work in your life and remove these sins from your heart. Stop resisting. Stop being stubborn. Some of you know what I mean because there are sins in your life, habitual sins, that the Lord has dealt with you about, and yet you are not letting Him remove it. Because you are resisting Him, and you are grieving Him by doing that.

But what about quenching? What does that mean? Well, in the context of 1 Thessalonians 5, which we’re not going to read, it’s a corporate context. It’s talking about praying in public, thanksgiving, prophecy, etc. It says, do not quench the Spirit, you know. Quenching the Spirit is what we do in the public service when we do not believe that God is working in our midst. It’s really a form of unbelief. And when the Spirit wants to speak, we say no. When the Spirit wants to heal, we say no. When the Spirit wants to do a work of power, we say no. Why? Because this is freaky. It’s scary. You mean I’m not totally in control of this thing? No, you are not in control of anything. Stop thinking you are. Because you’re not.

I remember reading Lloyd-Jones. If you haven’t heard of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, he’s considered one of the greatest British modern preachers of all time. He was preaching in the ’50s, ’60s. And people just flocked to his church. People were getting saved. People were being changed. And he was approached by a company and said, we really want you to come on the radio live. And they said, but we just got to let you know that when it’s 11 o’clock, you got to stop. Guess what he said? No thanks. I’m not going to be controlled by the clock. Because what’s happening in God’s church, or should be happening, is the Spirit is having His way. And we don’t say to the Spirit, thank you, goodbye now. Oh, Holy Spirit, sorry. We have to go to a commercial now. That’s not how it works. Yet many modern churches now, the services are literally scripted to the minute. At this time the band comes up, at this time the band has to stop, at this time the announcements. And it’s literally written out for the entire staff and the people working the production to know. God forbid if the Holy Ghost would show up. What do we do with Him? Well, that’s awkward. That’s just really awkward. God showed up in His church. What the heck is He doing? Jesus, You don’t fit. We won’t be done in time if You come in here and heal somebody. Such is the fear of the living God, even in His church. It’s fear, that’s all it is. And therefore, the Spirit is quenched when He would like to do things in our midst, speak things to us, heal, deliver. He wants to do these things in our church—say amen. But we have to let Him do it and stop resisting Him.

Be Filled with the Spirit

Three positive ones, then we’ll wrap it up. We’re told—I don’t think what order I should put these. Ephesians 5, turn there please. And Ephesians 5, oh, you’re already there probably, verse 18: “And do not be drunk with wine,” or whiskey or bourbon or whatever you drink. “Don’t be drunk, in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit.” How do we do that, Lord? “Speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God,” or the fear of Christ.

What’s interesting about this is we actually have a clear instruction of what filling means, or what are the means to the filling. And you know, what’s funny is that I was asked to preach probably over a month ago, and I had been praying, and I really had a burden to talk about Thanksgiving, not just the event, but the biblical teaching on thanksgiving. And I thought, well, you know, it’s coming up, so maybe I should talk about thanksgiving. Because I think, my humble opinion, one of the besetting sins of the church is ingratitude. I mean, we’ve got to get out of our bubble, people. We complain if the power goes out for two [audio unclear] We are not people that are overflowing with gratitude and filled with thanksgiving. One day a year doesn’t cut it. One day a week doesn’t cut it. Gratitude needs to become our attitude. Continual thanksgiving. Giving thanks in everything, meaning not just for the things but at all times. Being grateful. And then as we gather, we sing and we praise the Lord Jesus and we are thankful to Him for all that He’s done and all that He is doing in our lives, amen.

So we’re told here very clearly what to do. I remember—I’ve told this story before for those of you that were around when I preached here regularly. After I got saved, I had a radical conversion. I mean, when I got saved, the world heard about it, because I went from very dark to very light. You know what I’m saying? I was born again. I was changed, just like that. And I had, I mean, it was probably a couple years. It was like I was on a honeymoon with Jesus. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And then through a series of events, I got depressed. And I was in a real spiritual slump. Was not in a good place. I wasn’t happy about anything. I wasn’t thankful for anything. And I remember reading Philippians. Well, let’s go and read it just for the fun of it. I was reading in Philippians 4, where Paul says in verse 4, “Rejoice in the Lord”—when? Always. Oh my gosh, that’s a lot. Always. What if my coworkers are jerks? Always. Yikes. “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice.” He repeats it, darn. “And again I will say”—in other words, this is emphatic. This must be important. Rejoice. “Let your gentleness,” or moderation, “be known to all men. The Lord is near,” or at hand. “Be anxious for” what? Okay, some of you are worrywarts. And I know your excuse. Well, I love them so much. No. It’s just my nature. No. The Lord says, do not worry. That’s not my command. That’s His. Do not be anxious. Okay, then what do I do? “But in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God”—don’t you want the peace of God in your life? Even if everything around you is falling apart, don’t you want the peace of God? Yes, you do, right? “The peace of God which surpasses all understanding.” I mean, when things around you are crazy and you have peace, that surpasses understanding. It doesn’t mean—that’s a possible way of saying this doesn’t make any sense. It surpasses the rational view, if you will. And God will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue, if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things. The things which you learned and received and heard and saw in me, these do, and the God of peace will be with you.”

So back to my story, and I’m only talking about myself because I know myself, okay? Not because my story is more important than your story, it’s not. And I was depressed. I mean, I was just really in a funk. And I don’t mean for a few days or a few weeks. I was in a depression. And I read this text. And thankfully, the Holy Spirit was in me. And He convicted me. He said, you ain’t doing this. Well, and He’s got better English than that. He said, thou art not doing this. Thou art not rejoicing. And I got really convicted when I read verse 8, because I talk about all these things, you know, think on the positive, basically, the good. And so what I did is I got out a card. I like cards. I’m a card guy. I like to write things down. And so I carry these cards. And even back then, I just had cards. A little card. [audio unclear] Not so much. I didn’t like my boss. I was unhappy with my job. I worked at a Christian bookstore, and let me tell you, the Christians that came in there, they weren’t walking in the Spirit. They weren’t filled with the Holy Spirit. It was amazing the amount of abuse you took as a clerk, even in a Christian environment. My car wasn’t working. I had to take a bus to work. How bad is that? I was basically broke. I remember, I think back then—we’re talking a long time ago, right? I think I got paid weekly, not every other week. Pretty sure. I remember I’d go to the grocery store one day a week after I got paid. I had $11 for groceries. Now, granted, things were cheaper back then, but $11 even back then was not a lot of money. And I would literally take a calculator with me to make sure I didn’t get up there and get embarrassed at the counter, right? They had all this stuff I couldn’t pay for. So I was unhappy about a number of things. So what I did is I took the card out and I wrote those things down, and then I looked at verse 8. And I said, what is good about this list? Why might it be good that my boss has treated me so bad? Why might that be good for me? And God began to deal with me about my pride. Because you see, I didn’t like him, not because he was a bad boss. I didn’t like him because I didn’t like following orders. That was the truth. So I was the guy he always picked to clean the toilets. I was the guy that always had to take the trash out to the huge trash dumpster. If you’ve been around one of those things, it was brutal. And he, not knowing, was doing exactly what I needed. And God was using him to humble me. And I realized that, and now I could thank God for something that before I had been complaining about. And I went down the list, and I began to think of these different things that I had been harboring in my heart that were feeding this depression. And I looked at them, and I asked the Holy Spirit, show me the good in what I think is the bad. And He did. Not all at once, but He did. He taught me, and He did.

And what was amazing is as I went through this process, my boss became so nice. When in fact he hadn’t changed at all. My attitude changed. And I learned to be thankful for the things that before I wasn’t thankful for. When we read texts like “rejoice always,” or “give thanks in everything,” we read them and we zip by, and we don’t believe it’s possible. I’m telling you, it’s possible. It is possible. If the Holy Spirit—if you let Him have His way, it is possible. Sometimes God has to get us to the place where I was at. I mean, I was so depressed at the time, I was trying to figure out a way to kill myself, but not make Jesus look bad. So I had to make it look like an accident. I mean, I was at the park, but through the Word of God and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Lord brought me out of that. But He not only brought me out of that, He brought me out of that as a changed man, a changed man. And sometimes the Lord—you talk about our murmuring and ingratitude. Sometimes you go through things and then you go through another thing and then another thing, you’re like, man, I just can’t get a break. Well, no, no, no, no, no, you’re not getting breaks, you’re getting broken. You’re getting broken, my friend. And sometimes God has to bring you very low before He raises you up. Very low. And because we are so stubborn, that can take years. We resist. We fight. The flesh, it does not want to die. It does not want to die. We talked about warfare. The greatest enemy is not the devil. The greatest enemy is in your heart. The greatest enemy is the flesh. And it will attempt to deceive you. And it will tell you any excuse not to kill it.

I got off. What was I talking about? Being filled with the Spirit, I think. Yeah, the positive, being filled with the Spirit, where it talks about Ephesians and even here, being thankful. Let me give you something to do before Thanksgiving. Get out a card, get out a piece of paper. Make a list, number one, make a list of things that you can say you’re truly thankful for. You know, like your spouse. I’m thankful for that, but you probably haven’t thanked the Lord for those things in ages. By the way, when I say thank the Lord, I don’t mean just think about it. When I went through my transformation, I sat in this chair that was my place in my apartment, and what I would do is sit there with the Word. I began to sit there meditating on the Word, and I would hold my hands up to the Lord. I would say thank You. I did it every day for a long time. And that was for the hard things. Make a list of the things you can pretty easily thank Him for. Like, you know, what a great sermon you heard today, things like that. And then make the other list, then make the important list, the things you’re grumbling about. That’s the important list. Because that is grieving the Holy Spirit of God in your life. It’s grieving Him, that ingratitude. And then begin to meditate and ask the Holy Spirit to show you why. Why is this going on? And not why in a defiant way, but why. I need to understand. How can I be thankful for this difficult thing? How can I be thankful for this loss? What are You teaching me? And He will teach you. He will teach you.

Walk in the Spirit

Secondly, the second positive one is in Galatians 5, where it says, “Walk in the Spirit.” I know I’ve gone too long, so I’m going to go quick right here at the end. I studied Galatians years ago because I taught on it, and I’ve also preached through it in different contexts. And Paul says, “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” Straightforward, right? But as you read through the text, he never tells you how to do it. Like at least in Ephesians when he says, “Be filled with the Spirit,” he gives you some things to do. Well, what can I do? How can I contribute to this filling? Well, thanksgiving, praise, singing to the Lord, okay? But walking in the Spirit—he doesn’t say. And I studied this and I meditated on this, because I’m thinking, somebody’s going to ask me about this. I better figure this out, right? And what I realized is that, you know what the Galatian problem was? Well, if you read chapter 1, you find the Galatian problem is that believers, those who had professed Jesus as Messiah and Savior, they were being lured back into Judaism. They were being lured back into legalism, right, legalism. Well, you don’t tell a legalistic person, here’s your list of things to do. You got it? You got it. The worst thing Paul could have done is said, here’s three steps to walking in the Spirit. Ta-da. And so we do them real quick in the morning, I got that? I’m good. Right? I’m good. No, you learn to walk with the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, like you learn to walk with anybody else. You got to get to know them. Literally, you have to get to know them. You have to spend time alone with God and say to the Spirit, Come, Holy Spirit, and teach me, guide me, transform me. I want to hear, I want to be able to hear Your voice. In Romans it says that those who are the children of God are led by the Spirit of God. And we need to learn that still small voice of His prompting. So there’s no list I can give you for walking in the Spirit. But what Paul does give is he gives us a list to evaluate ourselves. He talks about the works of the flesh. Ugly, ugly, ugly. The fruit of the Spirit, beautiful, glorious. So we have the list. Look at the list honestly, and look at yourself with the help of the Holy Spirit, and you’ll know if you’re walking in the Spirit.

Ask for the Holy Spirit

I want you to look at Luke 11, and we’re going to close. In Luke 11, Jesus is teaching on prayer. He gives, we have in the opening part of chapter 11, the Lukan version of the Lord’s Prayer, which is shorter than the version in Matthew. Then Jesus, verse 5, gives the parable of the persistent friend. And verse 11 and 12 is what in my Bible is called the parable of fatherhood, but I think it’s really just an application of what was said previously, not a separate teaching. It says in verse 11, “If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish?” What’s the answer? It’s a rhetorical question assuming a negative answer. “Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?” What’s the answer? No. That’s not what fathers do. “If you then, being 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?”

Now, some of you think, well, hmm, if I’m saved, I have the Holy Spirit. Why would I ask for the Holy Spirit? My Bible even has a footnote on this. This prayer is not for Christians because we already have the Holy Spirit. Well, okay. Do you have the fullness of the Spirit? Do you experience the power of the Spirit? Are you seeing the fruit of the Spirit? Do you have the revelation of Jesus Christ through the Spirit? I mean, come on. We need the Holy Spirit as much at this moment as the day we got born again. And we need to ask for the Spirit’s fullness in our lives. Ask for the Spirit’s fruit, ask for the Spirit’s wisdom, ask for the Spirit’s power. We need to ask. And Jesus says, if you ask, and if you’re persistent, and if you will knock, and if you will seek, it will be granted to you. Tozer famously said, we have as much of God as we truly want. Will we comply with His work? Will we not just ask and walk away, but ask persistently, ask daily, even hourly?

Part of the transformation that God did in my life through that depression was learning about the Holy Spirit’s work in my life. And I remember every day when I went to work—I probably told you this too—I realized through this process of depression and really despair and then renewal through the Lord that I am not able to do anything, just like Jesus said. I can’t be the Christian I want to be. I can’t. And every day when I would go to work, I would pray. When I got to work, when I put my hand on the door handle, the doorknob to walk in, I said, Dear Holy Spirit, fill me. I prayed it every day. Fill me, fill me, fill me, fill me. And it was amazing. As I said, my boss became a great guy. My coworkers seemed easier to work with. The customers didn’t seem so mean anymore. What changed? Me. Because I was learning to be filled and to walk in the Spirit, but I had to ask and I had to mean it. Do you want to be filled with God’s Spirit? Yes or no? Yes, you do. Some of you do, some of you don’t, because you didn’t raise your hand. But if you honestly, before God, not before me, if you honestly want to be filled with God’s Spirit—and I don’t just mean a one-time event, I mean really learn to walk in the Spirit, to be continually filled, which is what the verb says in Ephesians 5—and seek, ask, pray, and don’t give up. Because the Lord wants to bestow upon you the fullness of the work of the Spirit, the fullness of the blessings that Jesus Christ has for you. But you must seek Him in prayer.

Let’s stand and pray. Lord, we thank You for Your Word. Lord, there’s so much that we could say and contemplate regarding Your Spirit’s work, and I know that I was only able to talk about a few things today. But Lord, I pray for myself and my wife and my family. I pray for this church. And I ask for the fullness of Your Holy Spirit. The fullness, Lord. I pray that You grant all of us a heart that surrenders to what You’re trying to take away. I pray that You grant us a heart through Your Spirit of gratitude and thankfulness. I pray that we would not be governed by our feelings and emotions, not be governed by our circumstances, but we would be governed by Your Holy Spirit. I pray You’d put a burning desire in each one of us, a burning desire for the fullness of the Spirit’s work in our life, and I pray it not because we want to be happy or we want to just enjoy the fruit. But I pray it because the honor of Jesus depends upon it. We are Your witnesses, Lord, and if we live a sub-Christian life, we are preaching a false gospel. So, Lord, transform us through Your Spirit, we pray, in Your name, Amen.