Spirit Of The Lord Series

Spirit of the LORD

Holy Spirit Series

July 30th, 2023

Scripture: Isaiah 11:1-3

Introduction-

I got saved in July of 1993, and thrown into the deep end of what it means to be a Pentecostal. Coming through a Lutheran background, I thought that the hand waving, speaking in tongues, dancing, and occasional prophetic word were pretty radical for church.

We had to relearn what we thought we knew about Christianity, and one of these things was the power of the Holy Spirit.

Over the years, we came across many people that claimed to have a special gift from God called “The Annointing”

The word anointing in the bible has a special meaning.

The Hebrew word for anointing is Mashach- which means to smear, press in, and infuse. An example of this is seen in Psalm 23, when the scripture says “He anoints my head with Oil, my cup runs over”.

In the case of the Holy Spirit anointing, it’s God smearing on, pressing into us, and infusing us with power from HIM.

In the Old Testament, this anointing was generally limited to Kings, leaders, warriors, or prophets. They were the only ones that typically received this extra special blessing from God through the Holy Spirit coming upon them in power.

So todayy, we are going to be looking at the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament.

Turn in your bibles to Isaiah 11, and we are going to look at a prophecy given specifically about Jesus about 500 years or so before He was born.

If you remember the details about Jesus’ baptism, it said that after HE came up out of the water, that the Holy Spirit came upon HIM like a dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit being upon HIM- anointing HIM for the mission.

The big idea I want us to get from this scripture today is that the anointing that was available to Jesus at his Holy Spirit baptism, is the same Holy Spirit anointing available to us today.

Scripture- Isaiah 11:1-2

There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse,

And a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

2 The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon Him,

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

The Spirit of counsel and might,

The Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD.

Prayer

Today’s message is going to be more teaching than preaching, which is why I’m doing this from down here instead of at the pulpit.

Many Old Testament commentators have labeled this section of Isaiah as the 7 fold Spirit of God. It gives a general idea of what the Holy Spirit’s function is in our lives, and what kinds of things we can expect from having a Holy Spirit baptism.

We are going to break these 7 descriptions down, and give an Old Testament example of how this was seen in their lives.

We are going to take them one at a time, but I will note at the beginning here that these gifts or attributes are not mutually exclusive- the bleed into one another and I think you will see this as we go through the lesson.

We begin today with-

Spirit of the LORD- Example- Moses

The Spirit of the LORD is tied into Leadership or Kingship.

Moses was called by God to do an impossible task- singlehandedly take on the world’s only superpower Egypt, which was being led by a man who considered himself to be a god.

Moses’ task was to demand the freedom of the people who were propping up Egypt’s entire national economy and making them the wealthiest nation of the known world.

No small task.

In fact, Moses tried to argue with God not to send him.

Imagine God calling you to walk into the Kremlin, barge into Vladmir Putin’s office, and demand that he do what the God he doesn’t believe in wants him to do.

That was the first major task Moses had to do.

The second, and probably most draining, was lead 6 million former slaves walking in circles in the desert for 40 years.

Not only was he the leader of the people, but also the senior pastor in many aspects, even with Aaron taking the role of high priest.

I want to take a moment and point out something very significant about this particular revelation of the Holy Spirit.

1. It’s name. The Hebrew for the word “LORD” here are the letters YHWH. It’s the Holy Name of God, from which we get the English transliteration of Yahweh or Jehovah from. The significance of this for us is that the person exhibiting the attributes of the Spirit of the LORD is acting in God’s power and authority.

2. This was very true of Moses. The bible said that he was so filled with the Spirit of the LORD that his face literally glowed.