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Los Lunas Cornerstone

Church of the Nazarene

The Forgotten God: The Attributes of the Spirit

    Thursday was Star Wars Day. It’s May the 4th every year, which sounds a lot like the Star Wars catch phrase, “May the force be with you.” So of course, I wore my best Star Wars T-shirt and send nerdy Star Wars texts to my family, because I like Star Wars. If you’re not familiar with Star Wars, I want to explain the force to you, as best I can, because a lot of Christians actually treat the Holy Spirit like the force in Star Wars.
    So the force is the life-force that connects all living things in the Star Wars universe. Every thing that is alive is connected through the force. But, there are some people and creatures that are called “force sensitive” meaning they are somehow able to tune in to the force and use its power to do either good things or evil things. The force itself isn’t good or evil, it’s just a power source, and it’s treated like a power source. Some of the evil characters in Star Wars see the force as a way to manipulate and control others for the benefit of these evil characters. So the force in many ways is treated as just a means to an end, an impersonal power source to be used to get what you want.
    Even though Christians might not think about the Holy Spirit like this, many are guilty of treating the Holy Spirit like this, as if He was some impersonal power source that you can just tap into when you need an extra boost of spiritual power. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Holy Spirit is not the force! We were reminded last week that the Holy Spirit is a person, and He is the very Spirit of God, God the Spirit, living and dwelling in the bodies and souls of believers in the Son, and the Spirit invites us to have a personal relationship with Him, just like we do with the Father and Son.
    Today we’re going to talk about the attributes of the Holy Spirit, things that describe who He is in greater detail that will help us understand Him better and help us better understand how He works in us and what sets Him apart from other ideas about “spirituality”.
    We need to know that the Holy Spirit is eternal. He is eternally alive, eternally active, and eternally working. There has never been a time when He did not exist alongside the Father because He is the Spirit of the Father. There will never be a time when He does not exist. He is eternally active, always doing things, always working. There has never been a time where He was not involved in the work of God, you can read all the way back in Genesis 1:1 that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters of the earth before it was formed and we see Him working in creation and in the lives of people all throughout Biblical history. We see Him working in Revelation at the very end. There is never a time when He isn’t working or active.
    Just in case we need a reminder of what eternal means, it means that He is abiding (always present), that He is CONSTANT, that He is continual, that He is enduring, that He is everlasting, that He is permanent, and this is maybe my favorite, that He is relentless. That means He is all those things with you and me. He is always present with me. He is constant with me. He is continual with me. He is enduring with me. He is everlasting with me. He is permanent with me. He is relentless with me. And every thing else that He is can be described in these ways too. His comfort is always present. His love is constant. His presence is continual. His mercy is enduring. His forgiveness is everlasting. His kindness is permanent. His guidance is relentless. See how cool that is?
    But let’s go to Scripture and take a look at some key moments in Scripture where we see these things are true. Look at Acts 2:38, “Peter said to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (NASB) The Day of Pentecost is the day we celebrate in the church as the day that the Holy Spirit was imparted to the church, to all believers, so they could be guided just as Jesus said they would.
    When the Spirit came upon those who were gathered in the upper room praying, and they went out to speak to others who gathered and each of those gathered heard the apostles speak in their own native tongue, some gathered thought the apostles were drunk. But Peter gave a sermon, setting them straight, reminding them of the promise that God and Christ gave that His Spirit would be poured out and He told them that day was the day that the promise had been fulfilled. We’re told that the people gathered, at least three thousand, were pierced to their hearts, and they asked what they must do to be saved. And “Peter said to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
    There is nothing else one must do to receive the Spirit, just repent, believe and receive the forgiveness of sins and you’ve got God’s Spirit living in you from that moment on. It’s never said in the New Testament that at any point the Spirit would be withdrawn from believers, as long as they continue in their belief. The Spirit doesn’t just come upon us only when we need Him or cry out to Him, He’s not the force, He is eternal, even in us!
    John 14:16 adds this to our understanding of how the Spirit is eternal with us, “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, so that He may be with you forever;” (NASB) Forever. That’s another word for eternal. He always lives and dwells in us, there is never a moment that He leaves us.
    The promise given in Matthew 28:20 is similar when Jesus promised, “and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (NASB) That was Jesus’s promise to His disciples, including us, as He was about to physically leave this earth and go to the Father. How does He keep this promise to be with us always? The Holy Spirit. Christ is not physically with us, but the Spirit of Christ is with us, always, to the end of the age.
    He is eternally alive in us, but also eternally active and eternally working in us. When Nicodemus, the Pharisee, asked Jesus what He must do to enter the kingdom of heaven, Jesus replied this, from John 3:5, “Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (NASB) We must be born of the Spirit to enter the kingdom of God.
    That means to me that the Spirit is, and we see this all throughout the New Testament, that the Spirit is always working in the life of the believer to bring about that saving work. Think about your own walk with the Lord. How many times have you ignored the Spirit’s prompting in your life and done your own thing? In those moments, and we all have them, we ignore the Spirit and thereby ignore God, we live for self, which is not what we agreed to do when we came to Christ. In those moments, the Spirit is working to extend grace to us to keep us in Him. He extends mercy to us to draw us back to Him. Please understand, I’m not saying that we lose our salvation anytime that we chose self over the Spirit, that’s not true at all. What I’m saying is that the Spirit is always working in us to help us work out our salvation, as Paul says. This is the process of allowing the Spirit to renew and regenerate us, thereby constantly keeping us in God’s saving grace. Therefore, what we see, is the Spirit eternally active and eternally working in believer’s lives to be eternally saving us and REGENERATING us, making us born again.
    One of the attributes of the Spirit then that we see is so important to us and how we relate to the Spirit is to know that He is eternally alive, always with the believer, never forsaking us, always speaking to us, eternally active in our lives to teach and guide and comfort and do all the other things He was sent to do, and eternally working in our lives to keep us in God’s grace and regenerating and renewing our inner person into a new creation.
    The next thing that is important for us to know about the Spirit is that He is Holy. In fact, Romans 1:4 says this about Him, “who was declared the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,” (NASB). He is the Spirit of holiness. Just like we learned that He is the Spirit of truth, and that means that we must define truth by what the Spirit says is true and who the Spirit is; in the same way, holiness can be defined and understood by looking at who the Spirit is and how the Spirit defines “holiness”. If the Spirit says something is holy, then that is how we must define and understand holiness. If the Spirit calls something “unholy”, then it is unholy!
    We’ve talked about holiness before, many times, but quite simply, holiness is being set apart. In saying that the Spirit is Holy, we say that He is set apart from any other god or ideas about spirituality. He isn’t like the force, He isn’t this new age feel good warm fuzzy feeling, He isn’t some mystical unknowable power. He is different than any being or deity or spirituality that the world knows.
    It is important for us to remember that the Spirit is Holy, set apart from all others, because if we remember this important theological truth, it changes the way we relate to Him. When we remember that it is a Holy Spirit that lives and dwells in each believer, then we begin to understand that He lives in us to set us apart from those who do not have Him in them as well. He lives in us, in part, to make us holy as He is holy.
    Hear what Hebrews 9:14 says, “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (NASB) The blood of Christ cleanses us from dead works so that we might serve the living God, and He does that in us, continuously, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us. It was through the Holy Spirit’s empowering that Christ was able to offer His blood as the cleansing sacrifice for our sins, and so it is through the Holy Spirit that we can take advantage of the forgiveness of sins bought by the blood of Christ and be made righteous. The Holy Spirit works in us to cleanse us of unrighteousness and dead works so that we might serve the living God!
    Romans 8:11 goes on to say this, “But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.” (NASB) This is another way of saying what Hebrews 9:14 said. Through the Spirit working in you and me and all believers, He brings us to life. He cleanses us. He gives us life the way the Lord defines it. This isn’t physical life or physical existence that is being talked about, it’s spiritual life. He gives us eternal life, brings our spirits to life, and keeps us in that state of being spiritually alive by regenerating us and making us holy.
    1 Corinthians 6:11 says it this way, “Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” (NASB) The Spirit is at work in each of us to do the washing, the sanctifying, the justifying in the name of Christ Jesus. All of this points to the process we call sanctification in the Nazarene denomination. The Spirit, He SANCTIFIES us. That means that He is at work in each of us, as we’ve been seeing throughout the New Testament, to change us, to make us holy, to set us apart.
    Here’s the thing though, because the Holy Spirit is a person, a part of the triune Godhead, someone we can have a personal relationship with, He will never force us to comply with the work He wants to do in us. He wants to change us, make us holy, set us apart, give us God’s righteousness, work in us to empower us and grow us…but we have to let Him. We have to agree. We have to work with Him. This is why growing in your relationship with the Spirit is so important, and why it must be done intentionally, it doesn’t just happen. Spend time with Him, speak with Him, listen to Him. He is eternally alive, eternally active, eternally working…in you! He is Holy, and He desires to make you holy, too!
    
Questions to form your quiet times this week:
1. Spend time this week thinking about what the free gift of God’s Holy Spirit living in you means to you today and in the future.

2. If the Holy Spirit is always in you, dwelling in you, and never leaves, why do Christians pray for more of the Spirit? Is this possible, or theologically correct? What might we pray for instead?

3. Do you treat your body as the dwelling place for a completely holy God? Are there any sins you need to repent of, as they have abused His holy sanctuary?

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