Who Is The Holy Spirit? Series

Here is where we are going today. We came out of a sermon series (four sermons) the last four weeks where we examined the topics that you had voted on – that you had chosen and then voted on. The top four topics each got a Sunday and then last Sunday, the #1 topic that was over 6,000 votes that was voted for was “Overcoming Struggles with Sin” or “Fighting Sin”. So at the end of that message we ended with in order to fight sin, we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit; to live by the Spirit of God within us; the power of Him. So that kind of opens up a whole new door of really where we are going now for the next four weeks of “Who is the Holy Spirit?” What does he do? What is my relationship to Him and with Him? So the next four weeks, we’re going to be in this series called, “Power to Live” and we’re going to be examining the person and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Today the question for us…the message is entitled “Who is the Holy Spirit?”

Next week is “My Relationship with the Holy Spirit.”

And then we have the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit”

And then the final message, “The Gifts of the Holy Spirit”

So we’re excited to be in this today. We’re going to dig into the Bible first and really get into some verses and we’re going to be all over the place. Then if you permit me, at the end of the message, its story time, okay? So we’ve got story time coming up.

So since we’re talking about Him, let’s ask the Holy Spirit to be here. Holy Spirit, come and fill our hearts so we can hear; open our eyes so we can see; take my speech and use it for Your glory. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

So the Holy Spirit…our heritage (I don’t know each one of you) but, I’m saying in general, my heritage is from that I grew up the first ten years of my life was in this area and the way that I grew up and the brand of Christianity that I was around had a certain way of looking at the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the activities of the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t very common to hear about the Holy Spirit or to really investigate what it meant to be filled with the Holy Spirit and what were the spiritual gifts that God has given you and you’ve got to find out what those are so you can use them in the body of Christ. It wasn’t really talked about that way.

I believe that because much of what I was learning about the Spirit-filled life was a reaction against charismatic teaching thought. Here’s what I mean. There’s a charismatic movement in evangelical Christianity and they would speak in tongues and have various manifestations of the Holy Spirit, they would say. It got really weird with some people. People were rolling around in the ground and as a reaction against that, I think, the reaction was too far to really to limit the person and the work of the Holy Spirit in my neat little box because the crazy charismatic’s over here kind of wanted us to do that. Maybe you need another example of crazy charismatics. So I’m going to give you a clip. Hit the lights back there. This is my good friend, Benny Hinn, healing people and hitting them with the power of the Holy Spirit. It just happens to be with his suit coat. So take a look.

Now is that God working in those people’s lives? In the Bible somewhere, Jebediah 14:11 say that you can fan the Holy Spirit to people and they fall over? No, of course not! That’s ridiculous. So as a reaction against that, I think, that where I came from…and I came from a lot of where you guys came from. We’re scared of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. So much so that if somebody raises their hand in worship, some of us…be honest…some of you would be like, “What’s going on there?” Yes, I knew I was onto something here.

So what I see then in my life is really not knowing exactly much about the Holy Spirit. Maybe some of you are in the same boat. In wanting to beware of this kind of stuff, we relegate the Holy Spirit to our neat little tidy box that we can organize that He never does anything other than what we’ve learned growing up with.

So I want to try today to talk about the Holy Spirit, learn about who He is and what He does, and then we’ll go into story time, remember? So, first let’s look at the Trinity because we’ve got to understand this concept of the Trinity. So if you have your Bibles, I invite you to take it out. We’re going to go to many different passages and we’re going to try to see if the Trinity is even in the Bible. The Trinity is the idea that God is One, but He is three persons in one. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It was in the baptismal formula. I didn’t make that up. That’s from Jesus in Matthew 28. The Father, the Son, the Spirit. But is the doctrine of the Trinity really in the Bible? We need to start here in Genesis 1 and we’ll start at verse 26: