Our pool is a salt pool which uses an electronic system to generate chlorine from the salt that is present in the water. I’m not sure exactly how the system works but I do understand that salt’s chemical composition is sodium chloride – a combination of sodium and chlorine and that somehow the electronic cell next to my filter is able to extract the chlorine from the salt and put it into my pool.
But that electronic cell regularly gets clogged up with some excess salt that clings to the inside of the cell and prevents that cell from doing what it was created to do and produce chlorine. So I have to remove the cell and clean it so it will be able to work properly again. This week as I was doing that cleaning, it reminded me of how I often prevent the Holy Spirit from doing His work in my life by clogging my life up with things that hinder His work.
For the past seven weeks, we’ve been learning about the Holy Spirit and how He works in our lives.
• We began by looking at the words of Jesus as He explained that the Holy Spirit is God and that He is a person
• We saw how the Holy Spirit operated in the Old Testament and in the life of Jesus and saw that the way He works is consistent throughout the Scriptures
• We looked at the work of the Holy Spirit in the process of salvation and discussed the idea of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the life of a Christ-follower.
• We examined how the Holy Spirit guides us through God’s Word and how to recognize His voice when he speaks to our spirit.
• We learned about the fruit that the Holy Spirit wants to develop in our lives – fruit that is consistent with His character.
• And finally last week, we focused on spiritual gifts that the Holy Spirit distributes to each believer in order to build up the body of Christ.
As we wrap up this series over the next two weeks, I want to focus on how we can take all these things that we’ve been learning and make sure that we don’t just engage in some academic exercise which results only in information, but that we also put these things into practice in our lives through application.
I’m going to approach that task from two angles. This week, I want us to examine the ways that we can hinder the Holy Spirit from doing His work in our lives. We’ll focus on some things that we can do that clog up our lives so much that it makes it difficult for the Holy Spirit to operate as He desires. And then next week, we’ll conclude by approaching the process of application from a more positive angle and talk about how we can walk in the Spirit on a consistent basis.
SINS AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT
There are five passages in the Bible that reveal specific sins against the Holy Spirit and we’ll look at all five this morning. Those five can be broken down into two groups and we’ll see that within each of those two groups the sins that are revealed in Scripture are closely related.
Let’s begin with sins against the Holy Spirit…
• By unbelievers:
The three ways that unbelievers can sin against the Holy Spirit are all related.
o Resisting the Holy Spirit
We see this sin against the Holy Spirit in the account of the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7. After being falsely accused of blasphemy against God by those who disputed him in some of the local synagogues, Stephen was arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin. Chapter 7 of Acts records his defense of his faith in Jesus. At the end of his discourse, he directs this condemnation to the men of the council:
“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.
(Acts 7:51 ESV)
Stephen is obviously addressing his condemnation to those who were not followers of Jesus. In fact these men were actually persecuting Christ followers. And the sin that they were guilty of was resisting the Holy Spirit.
In Acts 6, Stephen is described as being full of the Holy Spirit, a description which is repeated again at the end of chapter 7. Stephen is also described in chapter 6 as speaking by the wisdom of the Spirit.
So as he shares the gospel in Acts 7, his words are not just his words, but they are the words of the Holy Spirit being spoken through him. And I think it’s also safe to assume that the Holy Spirit was working on the hearts of those who heard Stephen’s words. But because those hearts were so hard, those men resisted the work of the Holy Spirit that was occurring. So instead of responding as the Spirit desired and surrendering their lives to God and trusting in Jesus, they chose to reject the truth that was being revealed to them and chose instead to hang on to their own idea of the truth.
As we’ve seen in this series on the Holy Spirit, one of His most important tasks is to draw people to Jesus and reveal the truth about the salvation that He offers to those who will trust in Him. And the Holy Spirit continues to do that in this world today, but unfortunately there are a lot of people who are just like the religious leaders that Stephen addressed who resist that revelation and therefore miss out on the abundant, eternal life that He desires for them to have.
The second way an unbeliever can sin against the Holy Spirit is by…
o Outraging the Holy Spirit
In chapter 10 of Hebrews, the author is writing about how we can have confidence to approach God because of our faith in Jesus, the one who made it possible for us to have a relationship with God through His sacrificial death. He emphasizes how our hearts have been made clean before God by Jesus.
But then he writes a word of warning to those who have received the truth about that salvation offered by Jesus and who reject that salvation so that they can go on living lives that are characterized by consistent, deliberate, unrepentant sin. And he points out that those who do that sin against the Holy Spirit by outraging Him:
How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?
(Hebrews 10:29 ESV)
The author of Hebrews isn’t describing those who reject a religion, but rather those who reject the person of God. That’s because being a Christ follower is a matter of entering into a relationship, not engaging in a religion. And as the person of the triune God who personally is responsible for drawing a person to God, revealing his or her sin and need for a savior, and who is the agent by which that person’s dead spirit can be regenerated, the Holy Spirit is insulted and outraged when a person rejects the work He is doing in his or her life.
The author of Hebrews is obviously addressing unbelievers with this warning. Only those who have refused to trust in Jesus for their salvation can be said to have trampled underfoot the Son of God and profaned the blood of Jesus and are therefore subject to God’s wrath. As Jesus made quite clear, those who have genuinely received the gift of eternal life that He offers are secure in His hands:
I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.
(John 10:28-29 ESV)
Based on those words, it is just not possible that believers could ever be guilty of outraging the Holy Spirit in this manner.
The sin of outraging the Holy Spirit certainly seems much more severe than the act of resisting Him. But there is one more way that an unbeliever can sin against the Holy Spirit that is even more severe…
o Blaspheming the Holy Spirit
Matthew, Mark and Luke all record Jesus’ comments about blaspheming the Holy Spirit. We’re going to use Matthew’s account this morning, since his account provides us with more detail about the circumstances which led to these words:
Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.
(Matthew 12:31-32 ESV)
This topic of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is a difficult one to tackle and there is certainly no shortage of ideas about what Jesus means here. But it is certainly worth grappling with since it is obviously an important matter since it is the one thing God does not forgive.
As always, context is crucial in understanding what Jesus meant. Matthew records that Jesus had just healed a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute. Although most of the people were amazed, the Pharisees accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, another name for Satan.
Jesus points out the folly of claiming that Satan would cast out his own demons and then He speaks these key words:
But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
(Matthew 12:28 ESV)
So given the context, it seems pretty clear that in that case blasphemy of the Sprit was the act of attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan. These people saw the divine power of the Holy Spirit working in Jesus’ life which was evidence that Jesus was ushering in the kingdom of God right before them. But these religious leaders not only willfully refused to believe that the Holy Spirit was at work in Jesus’ ministry, but went so far as to give credit to Satan.
And Jesus was pointing out that for those who did that, salvation was impossible. That sin was unforgivable because it struck at the very heart of the redemptive work of Jesus, which He carried out, as we saw previously in this series, by the empowering of the Holy Spirit. So there was no hope for them.
The remaining question is whether the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit was limited to that group of Pharisees at that point in history or whether it is still possible to commit that unpardonable sin today. There are certainly a large number of Bible scholars and commentators that hold to each of those views.
Personally I tend to lean toward the first view – that Jesus was only addressing that group of Pharisees. But even if that is the case and it is no longer possible to commit that specific sin today, the Bible is clear that resisting and outraging the Holy Spirit is a dangerous thing to do because every time we do that we harden our hearts and at some point they will become so hard that it will no longer be possible for us to respond to Him. Whether that is technically blaspheming the Holy Spirit or not really doesn’t matter – either way it’s not somewhere we want to go because there are severe consequences for doing so. And since it is just not possible for us to know when we’re crossing that line, we need to be really careful to make sure we don’t get anywhere near it.
That’s why that throughout the New Testament there is an emphasis on the urgency of placing one’s faith in Jesus right now and not waiting. The writer of the Hebrews put it like this:
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
(Hebrews 3:12-15 ESV)
Before we proceed, let’s pause here for a moment to think about the implications of resisting, outraging and blaspheming the Holy Spirit. If you have never placed your trust in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation, then the fact is that you’re guilty of one or all of these sins. And the consequences of doing that are far reaching. That not only means that you’ll spend eternity in a place of everlasting torment separated permanently from God, but also that you’ll miss out right here and now on the abundant life that God wants you to experience.
So if that describes your life, we invite you today to deal with those sins by confessing them to God, asking Him to forgive them in the name of Jesus and by placing your trust in Jesus alone as the means for dealing with those and all the other sins in your life. I’d like to pray right now for any who need to experience that new start.
[Prayer]
Unbelievers are not the only ones who can sin against the Holy Spirit. The Bible reveals that sins against Him can also be committed…
• By Christ-followers:
There are two specific sins against the Holy Spirit that can be committed by a genuine Christ follower.
o Quenching the Holy Spirit
Do not quench the Spirit.
(1 Thessalonians 5:19 ESV)
The word translated “quench” literally means to “extinguish or suppress a fire”. That same word is used by Jesus when describing hell as a place where the fire will not be quenched. And it is used by Paul in describing the shield of faith, with which we extinguish the flaming arrows of the evil one.
Earlier I described how the salt cell in my pool gets clogged up and won’t operate as it should. That excess salt quenches or suppresses the ability of that cell to create chlorine.
Whenever the Holy Spirit comes into our lives and attempts to reveal Himself and His purposes, plans and ways for our lives and we fail to keep in step with His leading, then we quench Him in much the same way. The only difference is that quenching the Holy Spirit usually doesn’t just happen on its own – it is almost always the result of a deliberate choice we make.
I want to make this very practical, so this seems like a good time to review some of the main points from the message from three weeks ago where we focused on how the Holy Spirit guides us. Since we quench the Spirit when we fail to follow His leadings in our life, it’s helpful to be reminded how He guides us.
How the Holy Spirit guides us:
Externally – through God’s Word
This is the primary way the Holy Spirit guides us. So every time that we choose to disobey His Word, we quench His work in our lives.
Internally – How to recognize God’s voice
1) The Holy Spirit ALWAYS speaks in a way that is 100% consistent with God’s Word
The Holy Spirit will never lead us to do anything that is not 100% consistent with God’s Word
2) The Holy Spirit tends to speak when I am seeking God
During “Connections” today we’re going to take some time to go into some more depth on this as we look at the surrounding context in 1 Thessalonians 5.
3) The Holy Spirit tends to speak with gentle leadings
The Holy Spirit doesn’t usually lead us to act merely on impulse.
4) The Holy Spirit tends to speak to me personally
He speaks to me about what He wants me to do rather than revealing to me what someone else needs to do in his or her life.
5) The Holy Spirit tends to speak specifically
He does this both in convicting me of my sin to me and in giving me guidance for my life
6) The guidance of the Holy Spirit produces peace
God is a God of peace and order, not of chaos.
Whenever God’s Holy Spirit guides me in this manner and I choose not to follow His leading then I quench Him. And that leads directly to the second sin that I can commit against the Holy Spirit…
o Grieving the Holy Spirit
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
(Ephesians 4:30 ESV)
Grieving the Holy Spirit is the natural result of quenching the Spirit. Quenching is what we do when we resist the Spirit’s leading in our lives and grieving is how the Holy Spirit responds to the quenching. Because the Holy Spirit is a person, He can be pained and offended when we quench His work in our lives. He longs to make us holy by revealing God’s character and will for our lives and by empowering us to develop fruit in our lives that is consistent with that character. But when we resist His work in our lives it damages our fellowship with Him and that brings Him grief because He loves us and desires to have a relationship with us.
Therefore when we grieve the Holy Spirit there is a need for reconciliation and restoration so that we can be in fellowship with Him once again.
There is a sense in which all sin quenches the Holy Spirit because when we sin we either fail to do something that the Holy Spirit is leading us to do or we’re doing something that the Holy Spirit has revealed that we are not to do. And therefore all of our sin also grieves the Holy Spirit as well. We’ll also spend some more time following up on that idea in “Connections” as we look at Ephesians 4 and explore the context of Paul’s command not to grieve the Spirit.
Earlier I asked those of you who have sinned against the Holy Spirit by resisting, outraging or blaspheming Him to respond to God’s Word by seeking His forgiveness and placing your trust in Jesus.
Right now, I want to issue a similar invitation to those of us who are Christ followers, but who have sinned against the Holy Spirit by quenching and thus grieving Him. So I’m going to give us all some time to pray and ask God to reveal any unconfessed sin in our lives – any of the ways that we have quenched the Holy Spirit by failing to follow Him. I want to encourage you to think about how you have grieved the Holy Spirit with that sin. And then go ahead and confess that sin, knowing that God has promised to forgive that sin and purify you and restore your relationship with Him.
[Prayer]
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