Introducing...

I was fourteen years old in March of 1986, and I found myself in line with thousands of my closest friends, all waiting for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to receive the autograph of the one-and-only Jim McMahon, the quarterback of the Monsters of the Midway, the Super Bowl-winning Chicago Bears. After I shelled out entirely too much money for a poster, my brother and I waited patiently in line until I was finally face-to-face with the Super-Bowl-winning quarterback himself.

I had watched many of the Chicago Bears’ games that year, most notably the Super Bowl. I knew all about McMahon’s penchant for wearing non-sanctioned headbands, his injuries, even his acupuncture. So how do you expect he greeted me when I walked up the steps to the table where he sat autographing pictures? After all, I knew all about him. If you’re wondering, he didn’t greet me at all. He didn’t even look at me. He just scrawled his name on my poster.

I could tell you that I met Jim McMahon that day, but I really didn’t. And there are a lot of people in our world who have had a similar experience with God. They have been in a crowd where a bunch of people have gathered, many of whom seem to know Him, but others who don’t and are just along to check out the hype.

There is a difference between knowing about someone and knowing someone. It seems like in our American mainline denominational churches, we put great stress on knowing about God – we offer Bible studies and various groups, but there is no guarantee that we’ll actually get to know Him through our various activities.

Unfortunately it seems like we don’t even get the chance to know that much about the Holy Spirit.

The first thing we need to know about the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is a Person. Not a person, as in a human being, but a Person, as in a Personal Being, not just an impersonal force. We’re big Star Wars fans in our house and the Star Wars universe revolves around an impersonal Force surrounding everything and in everyone and everything, but that is not reality. We cannot describe the Holy Spirit using Star Wars terminology.

In John chapters 14, 15, and 16, we see some clues to confirm that the Holy Spirit is a Person and not just a force. It would help if you turn in your Bibles to John 14, so we can look at some of these passages together. In John 14:16 Jesus says: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.

Now skip down to 14:26, where Jesus says, “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”

In the next chapter, 15:26, Jesus says, “When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth whom goes out from the Father, he will testify about me.”

And in chapter 16, verse 7, “But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you: but if I go, I will send him to you.”

There is a world of difference between being indwelt by an impersonal force or a Person. My family has taken multiple vacations to Lake Michigan, where we’ll spend a lot of time on the beach. It can be fun to ride on a float, going wherever the water takes you, or, if you’re caught in a riptide, it could be tempting to think that the waves are out to get you, but you’ve got to understand that the waves do not have a mind of their own; they are simply waves, following their pattern endlessly, pounding on the shore, redistributing sand, sweeping out and pouring back, again and again.

While waves do act, they are impersonal. They don’t have a goal or opinions. They do not care about you. They cannot counsel, guide, or lead you. They simply crash on the shore and sweep out to sea.

But the Holy Spirit is not an it, but a Person. And this is the One who Jesus promised would live within the believer. When you take this truth into consideration, the next one will be so much more powerful. Not only is the Holy Spirit a Person, but the Holy Spirit is God.

The One who lives within us, who leads us, who purifies us, is God Himself.  Do you want to know God’s will? The Holy Spirit knows God’s will, and lives within us! Listen to 1 Corinthians 2:9-12- As it is written, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him – but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely taught us. Paul sums up his thought in 2:16 where he quotes Isaiah, saying, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

You see, even here, the Holy Spirit is being equated with God and with Jesus. God is Trinitarian – the Father is God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. But the Father is not the Son or the Holy Spirit, Jesus is not the Father or the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit isn’t the Father or Jesus. How exactly does this work? I’ve heard the Holy Spirit explained in terms of forms of water: ice, water, and steam, but it just doesn’t work to explain God in human or material terms.

As we read in Isaiah 55:8-9, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. There are some questions we won’t know the answer to simply because we are not God. Turn to your neighbor and tell them, “You are not God.” Now respond, “Good, you aren’t God, either!” Because we’re not God, we don’t have to have all the answers. I like to think I’ll ask God all these questions when I get to Heaven (I probably won’t, but that’s another sermon).

So, if the Holy Spirit is a Person, a Person who indwells us, why is it that we often do not experience His Presence? We often limit the work of the Holy Spirit to our emotional response. If I asked you how you knew the Holy Spirit was here, often the answers include that we experience the presence of the Holy Spirit when we sing the right songs. Or when I get that goose bump tingling sensation or a warm sensation or when I start to cry.

So you’re saying that if the songs aren’t right, the Spirit isn’t there? Or, more like, if we don’t sing your favorite songs or if we don’t use the right instrumentation, then Satan has shot-blocked the Holy Spirit? And I get goose bumps when I feel a cold breeze. And I feel a warm sensation when I’m embarrassed. And I freely cry when I cut onions, especially the red ones I’ve been buying lately. So why don’t I always feel the Holy Spirit, especially since Jesus promised that He would be with us always?

There are many reasons why we don’t experience the Holy Spirit, and I want to highlight three:

1.                  There is often too much noise in our lives. We’ve got 24/7 access to television programming, and the idea of the whole-house DVR means you can watch whatever you want whenever you want to. We have the ability to surf the web, play games, listen to music, check the weather, watch videos, comparison shop, pretty much anything you can imagine, and we can do it all on our phones wherever and whenever we want.  Oh, and we can use them to talk or text as well.

We’re busier than ever, always doing something, always going somewhere. A friend of mine wondered after he retired, “When did I ever find the time to have a job?!” Life is busy, and often we’re busy with really good things. But then we’re falling into the devil’s schemes. If he can’t convert us, he can make us so busy that we don’t notice the Holy Spirit.

Because God usually doesn’t speak to us really loudly. Sure, there is the “holy 2x4” that God sometimes uses to get our attention, but God usually speaks quietly. In 1 Kings 19, Elijah is on the run from King Ahab, who is trying to kill him. This is right after one of my favorite Bible stories, the showdown between Elijah and  the 450 prophets of Baal, where God sent Holy Fire down on Elijah’s sacrifice. But immediately after this King Ahab and his evil wife Jezebel are trying to hunt Elijah down and kill him. Elijah is hiding in a cave, and God meets him there.

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the  Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper… (1 Kings 19:11-12) And this was God’s voice. Are we quiet enough to hear the gentle whisper?

2.                  A second reason we don’t experience the Holy Spirit’s presence is that maybe you have built a wall of sin. God is a holy God, and sin cannot remain in His presence. Listen to Isaiah 59:1-2 Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. There’s a problem: God can hear you when you call, but your sins have cut you off from Him.

I want to be clear here, because there can be some misunderstanding here: if you are a Christian and you sin, you are still a Christian. When I was in Drivers’ Ed, I had a classmate who ran a stoplight. The driving instructor right there said, “There goes your waver,” meaning, “Because you missed that stoplight, you aren’t getting your license.” God doesn’t do that. We are covered by Jesus’ blood. His sacrifice is sufficient to cover our past sins, our present sins, and our future sins. But if we continue living with unrepentant sin, meaning you keep on sinning and you don’t care about your sin, this is going to negatively affect your relationship with God.

Think about it in relationship terms – because the Holy Spirit is a Person. If I lie to my wife, what does it do to our relationship? How about if I continue to lie? When I tell that first lie, there goes a brick. Another lie, another brick. Soon, I’ve walled myself off from my wife. Are we still married? Yes. But is there a problem? Yes! And likewise, when we continue in sin, we wall ourselves off from the Holy Spirit.

We can often become hard-hearted or calloused toward the Spirit; we ignore Him for so long until we forget what His voice even sounds like. When Jesus’ disciples asked why He was teaching in parables, he told them that Isaiah’s prophecy was being fulfilled: “You will be ever hearing but never understanding, you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused, they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and in turn I would heal them.” (Matthew 13:15) This people’s heart has become calloused. We have every opportunity to see the Holy Spirit at work, to hear His voice, and to understand Him, but our eyes are wide open and staring at nothing. Our ears are attuned only to the buzz of static around us, and we never hear. At times we have taken God for granted and have become calloused to the point where we don’t even realize that we’re not spending time with Him anymore. That has to stop!

3.                  Finally, some people don’t experience the Holy Spirit because they’re not Christians. I don’t like to mention this, and I’m not picking on anyone in particular, but we have to realize that even Jesus said,“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)

Maybe this describes you. Maybe you have gone through all the motions, but you’ve never surrendered your life. Realize that you’re not promised tomorrow. Last week I got the news that a good friend of ours died suddenly on Tuesday. Another friend was diagnosed with cancer. Another had a bad fall. Some of you can relate. We are not promised tomorrow. So if you are not a Christian, if you aren’t following Jesus with everything you are, if the Holy Spirit is beckoning to you, calling you, don’t delay.