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The Authority of the Holy Spirit
Romans 8:5 “Those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.”
How much authority is the Holy Spirit having over our lives? Let me use the language of the apostle in our text; how much are you living in accordance with the Spirit? How do you think Christians show that they are under the Spirit’s authority?
1. THE MARKS OF THE AUTHORITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
There are three words that describe his work. On the surface they are rather cold Latin-based vocables, intimidating and cerebral, but behind them lies all the loving power of God. The words are ‘revelation,’ ‘regeneration’ and ‘sanctification.’ In all three the authority of the Spirit is manifest.
i] Revelation. The Holy Spirit’s authority was made known to the church in the way he revealed the word of God to the prophets and later to the apostles. “Prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21). Jeremiah didn’t come up with some bright religious ideas which he preached to anyone who would hear him. “Prophecy never had its origin in the will of man.” Jeremiah was borne along by the Holy Spirit when he delivered and wrote his prophecies. What the Holy Spirit said, Jeremiah said. Peter, later on in that second letter, writes of Paul’s epistles, “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Pet. 3:16). So Peter puts Paul’s writings in the same category as “the other Scriptures” - such as the writings of Jeremiah. In other words the authority of the Spirit is first expressed in the Book he has written; we submit to the Spirit by submitting to the Book. Christians are under a moral obligation to do that.
ii] Regeneration. The Holy Spirit’s authority is made known in the people whose hearts he changes. He is the only one who can add to the church those who are being saved. He does so by his sovereign work of regeneration. Church Growth is his special sphere of activity. So, just as divine revelation is of the Spirit so also is salvation. “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8). The Spirit of God takes the initiative in converting sinners. He does this firstly, by the stirring their conscience, by various influences he has caused to touch them in their lives, by showing them the glory of God in creation, and, most of all, by the Scriptures as they read them and hear them preached. Then, secondly, and essentially, unbelievers are called by the effective and invincible grace of the Spirit in their hearts. God the Holy Ghost illuminates the dark recesses of their hearts, giving them understanding, and he renews their wills. The Holy Spirit invariably uses Scripture as the tool for regeneration, but regeneration is the result of his internal, effectual and irresistible grace. So all Christians from their regeneration are sealed with the Holy Spirit. He is the stamp of divine authority on each one of them. When we call a Christian, “Brother!” we are acknowledging the authority of the Spirit in saving him. Each one can testify to the Spirit’s authority in saving them like this:
“Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night.
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray’
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light.
My chains fell off; my heart was free,
I rose, went forth and followed Thee (Charles Wesley)
The third way we show we are under the authority of the Spirit is in . . .
iii] Sanctification. Just as the coming of the truth from God to man is by the authority of the Spirit, and just as the change of men from unbelieving to believing is through the authority of the Holy Spirit so the change of sinners into the likeness of Christ is through the authority of the Spirit. Who can take a depraved man and transform him and make him Christ-like? Only the Holy Spirit can do it. He does this in two ways;
Firstly in mortification: “For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live” (Roms. 8:13). The energy that the Spirit gives us to strangle remaining sin is indispensable to any triumph over our lusts we are gong to know. And you are the one who has to do this killing work to your own sinful nature. “You put to death the misdeeds of the body.” You do not sit back and let the Spirit do it. You must do it, and only then will you live! That’s the condition that is laid out for all of us under the gospel. Don’t give remaining sin any titbits. Don’t feed it anything. Your putting to death remaining sin is a proof of the authority that the Spirit has over you. The highway of holiness is the only road that leads to heaven. Some of you complain to me that you feel more and more the power of sin in your lives. I say, “That’s because you are more conscious of your inward corruptions than you used to be. That tenderness to your sin is a mark that the Holy Spirit is authoritatively working in you.” George Verwer says, “I am a terrible slave to my emotions: in the course of a single day I can go up and down as much as twenty-five times. If any of you lean a bit towards a similar instability then I can tell you that there is still hope: I have found it necessary to be ruthless with my feelings, to dominate my gut-level reactions. It is not easy, but the reward is great.” So the one way that sanctification progresses is by us being ruthless with our feelings.
Secondly, the Spirit transforms all of us whom he indwells by fixing our minds constantly on the glories of Christ: “we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cors. 3:18). Every Christian is in the process of being transformed and it happens as we have our attentions focused on the Lord Jesus. All true Christians are constantly being changed, more and more, into his likeness, with ever-increasing glory. Robert Murray M’Cheyne in his 20s evidently displayed that Christ-likeness, and we personally know some favoured older men and women in whom we believe that much of heaven is seen. This is what the Holy Spirit produces, and he does so by turning our eyes upon Jesus again and again.
Now what have I just been talking about? I have just taken the two great Christian duties that are found throughout the Bible, repentance and faith. Through repentance we are sanctified by the Spirit and this is seen in your constant mortification, and through constant trust you are sanctified, and that is shown as you continually look to Jesus. It is when these graces are evident in a believer then the authority of the Holy Spirit in sanctification is displayed. We repent and we trust, and we are changed.
So there are those three ways in which the authority of the Spirit manifests itself in the life of the Christian. If you want to know God it is only through the work of the Holy Spirit in revelation. If you want to love God it is only through the work of the Spirit in regeneration. If you want to become like God it is through the work of the Spirit in sanctification.
2. THE CHRISTIAN’S SUBMISSION TO THE AUTHORITY OF THE SPIRIT.
The Holy Spirit is absolutely Sovereign as the Lord who controls our lives, and we are to live under his authority in everything we do, in every choice and decision we make, in the great things – the choice of what we believe about God, our career and our spouse – and then the little things also – the clothes we wear and how we spend our evenings and so on (and yet how rarely are any of the decisions we take inconsequential). The Spirit has all authority over our lives, and the children of God are led through life and into eternity by the Holy Spirit. How do we show our submission to his authority?
i] Not by following hunches but by obeying the Scriptures.
Let me begin by clearing away some of the misconceptions about the authority of the Spirit. Some goosey-loosey folk talk incessantly about having the authority of the Spirit in almost everything they do – “The Spirit told me . . . the Spirit showed me . . . the Spirit led me to do this or that” – and this sort of language encourages other Christians to think that this is how it should be for them too. Are we to expect immediate guidance by the Spirit for every decision we take? If there is some striking coincidence, or some new notion from a verse in the Bible, or some intrusive thought that hooks onto our minds and won’t go away then immediately such things are given the authority of the Holy Spirit himself. Two results come from this; the first is pride, elitism, a sense of superiority in those who claim to have constant nudges or whispers from the God the Holy Ghost. The second is a feeling of anxiety and depression and paralysis of action because the rest of us don’t get those hunches from heaven, and so we judge ourselves to be second-class Christians.
So how do we show our submission to the authority of the Holy Spirit?
We sit under the authoritative book of the Spirit-given God each week. It will constantly be saying to us, “Live like this . . . believe these truths . . . be this kind of father . . . be this kind of church member . . . be this kind of neighbour . . . treat your enemy like this . . .” and so on, and that is the Spirit of God making connection with our lives. He personalizes and particularizes the big word that we hear preached week by week so that we grasp what is the will of God for these days in college or work or in the kitchen or in retirement. The result of sitting under systematic, expository, experiential preaching is not so much that we get “little messages from God” every Sunday. No! Rather, that we are built up in how to think and how to make judgments and how to grow in discernment. We are progressively established as Christ-like men and women. That is the work of the Spirit.
We must hear wisdom from God every Sunday without fail, and then, quite imperceptibly, that wisdom increasingly becomes ours; that is how we ourselves think; it’s the Spirit’s gift to us week after week. It renews our minds and we start to reason and behave as God desires. So that mind which was in Christ Jesus is also increasingly in us. Because we are constantly sitting under Spirit-led ministry of the Spirit-inspired Book we are not under the authority of our age with all its stars and supremos. Our minds are being renewed by the Spirit day by day. In such a way the authority of the Holy Spirit over us is shown.
Of course there can be flashes of light in extraordinary, direct and immediate ways. God can do that. I won’t deny it. But we have no business expecting to be led all through our lives like that when God has gone to such pains in providing his Scriptures for us, calling and gifting his ministers to preach all the Bible to us. So not by hunches but by understanding and obeying the Holy Scripture do we show the authority of the Spirit over us.
ii] Not by despair when we sin but by repentant restoration.
The Holy Spirit has a plan for the world. It has been given to him by the Father and the Son. He is to convict and make alive everyone that he’s sent to, taking them safely to heaven, changing them all into the likeness of God. That is the authoritative plan by which the Spirit is at work today; I have no doubt about that at all. We know God’s plan but we don’t know all the names on the plan.
There are religious people who think, alas, that they are no longer part of the Spirit’s plan. They had once happily started out on this journey to Christ-likeness, but they think that they have missed their connection by some folly they fell into. Maybe it was when they were in college, or when they married the wrong person, or had a fall in their place of work, whatever . . . and so they now believe their lives are ruined. All that’s left for their futures is Plan B, some sort of second-best, sub-standard Christian life. They don’t think they are on the scrap heap, but they’re certain that they’re on the shelf, and all their usefulness to God has gone. The salt has lost its savour. They are sentenced for the rest of their lives to being second-rate Christians.
Again let me correct that delusion. It is all speculation. You don’t know that you are on the shelf. I would think that the devil would like to tell many Christians they’re over and done for. If he can get Christians believing that then he’s done a very clever thing indeed. It is all a fancy; it is all guesswork; it is a fantasy; it is Harry Potter-land. There is nothing in Scripture to support such a morbid idea.
Don’t you think God may permit us to fall in order to humble us deeply? Don’t you think that Peter learned lessons at that fireside he couldn’t learn any other way? Don’t you think that even though what Peter did was absolutely wrong he eventually became a better man for it? Don’t you think God can put you back on track when you’ve wandered away? I know that bad choices have bad consequences, and that we have to live with them. Jacob had to live with his limp which he got fighting with God at Jabbok, and David had to live with family troubles which he brought on himself, but the idea that God cannot forgive, or will not forgive or refuses to restore when transgressors and wanderers confess their follies and repent of sin, or that the rest of our lives is Plan B flies in the face of God’s word. We are still under the authority of the Spirit though we have fallen.
Look at this clear lesson that jumps out at us from God-breathed Scripture. Many of God’s servants made great and grievous mistakes – Jacob beggared his brother, and fooled his father. Moses killed an Egyptian; I wonder how many children of Israel were killed by the Egyptians in retaliation? A hundred? A thousand? Maybe. No wonder Moses ran away for decades and hid in the back side of the desert. David numbered the people; Peter boycotted Gentile Christians in the church at Antioch. None of those men was instantly demoted to a second-class status. God didn’t say curtly, “The salt has lost its savour. Throw it on the road and trample it down.” The Spirit did not tell them that they were no longer under his authority. If God restored David after sleeping with Bathsheba and taking out Uriah, and restored Peter after his threefold denial of Christ then we shouldn’t doubt God’s readiness to restore Christians who acknowledge that they’ve failed badly in their lives. It’s a blasphemous mistake to think that after we have gone to God in repentance and confessed our sins to him in the name of Jesus that he refuses to forgive us. So we show we are under the authority of the Spirit, not by sinless lives but by constant repentance for our sins. You say, “Yes, but you must go to God agonizing, rolling on the floor and weeping.” Why do you think that? Go to God in the name of Jesus and say, “I am sorry Lord about all of that. I am so sorry. Forgive me for my sins.” And grace says, “Forgiven!”
iii] Not by grieving the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 4:30.
How can we be under the authority of the Spirit if we grieve him by doing something that is contrary to God himself? The Holy Spirit is God, the third Person of the Trinity, and Father, Son and Spirit are co-equal and co-eternal. The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God and these three are one God. So anything that is anti-God or anti-Christ is going to grieve the Holy Spirit. That is very evident from his title in this verse in Ephesians; he is “the Holy Spirit of God.” He is the Holy Spirit who comes from God the Father and from God the Son to work in the lives of the people whom God loves. Anything then that is opposed to God and to Christ is going to grieve, deeply grieve, the Holy Spirit of God. We are not to take the name of the Lord in vain, we are not to use God’s name as a curse or a blasphemy, we are not to be casual or careless about referring to our heavenly Father or to the Lord Jesus Christ. Such things are impossible for those under the authority of the Holy Spirit of God.
He is also the Spirit of truth, so anything which is contrary to the truth revealed in the Scriptures, is going to grieve the Holy Spirit. We are not to allow into our lives deceit, a lying tongue, a half truth, a studied silence, or entertain errors which are contrary to the word of truth because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth. He is the one who inspired men of old to write the truth down for us for our instruction and edification. Anything in our hearts which is rebelling against the truth of the Scriptures, anything that is defying the commands of the Bible grieves the Holy Spirit of God. Modernism is a Spirit-grieving movement. It has driven the Spirit of God from thousands of churches in Europe.
Again, anything contrary to the spirit of love will grieve him, for the Holy Spirit is the source of our spiritual affections. The Holy Spirit is the one who enables us to love our neighbours as ourselves; he gives us grace to love our enemies, to do good to those who despitefully use us, and he helps us live in harmony and peace with our brethren. Go back to the earlier part of chapter 4 there in this epistle to the Ephesians and in verse two we read, “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” and it will surely grieve the Spirit if hostility and scorn and impatience are allowed into our fellowship and in our relationships. What place does division and strife, bitterness and impatience have in the body of Christ? It grieves the Holy Spirit of God. If we are under the authority of the Spirit then we dare not grieve the Holy Spirit of God. Then let me bring up another prohibition . . .
iv] Not by quenching the Spirit I Thessalonians 5:18.
If you are under the Spirit’s authority then you do not quench the Spirit. Take those two words together, ‘grieve’ and then ‘quench’, I think that you will sense that there’s a sort of desperate choking about the word ‘quench.’ There is something so threatening about it. It’s like extinguishing something that was alive, blowing a flame out, focusing foam on a fire to quench it. So if grieving the Spirit is what causes the Spirit’s influence to be lessened in our lives, quenching the Spirit is something which causes the influence of the Spirit in our lives to cease. Then we’ve not only grown cold spiritually, we’ve quenched the Spirit and the Spirit in that sense has (I won’t say ‘forsaken us,’ because that is not true of God's children, it cannot be true) turned his back on us, and taken his comforting influences from us. We’ve been behaving as though we can do without the Spirit, that we don’t need to be under his authority, and it’s almost as though the Holy Spirit says, ‘Very well then, see how you get on without me.’ That is quenching the Spirit, doing anything which causes the Spirit’s influence to die down in our lives. That results in a spiritual disaster. If we have not been startled by the word ‘grieve’, we might be painfully warned by the possibility of ‘quenching’ the Spirit.
What are the particular things which would quench the Spirit? Well, to persist in any of those attitudes that I mentioned above, to wilfully and sinfully persist in error and in defying God and in lovelessness, if we don’t genuinely and honestly repent and turn from the things that grieve the Spirit, then I believe the next stage in our backsliding, will be to quench the Spirit. I believe that if a man persists in wilfully opposing the word of God, and sticks to a life of unholiness, he is in grave danger of quenching the Spirit. That, men and women, is but a step from the edge of the abyss. You can’t survive spiritually on your own, so ‘quench not the Spirit’.
One of the things that Satan is always trying to do is to inject some evil into our lives and encourage us to belittle the evil, to defend it, to rationalize it, to justify ourselves, to excuse ourselves so that we can deaden our conscience and carry on in the way we know to be wrong; and that is the way to quench the Spirit. I believe that is one of the greatest griefs that anyone can have who is really a child of God. They fear that they have quenched the Spirit. They feel there is no hope for them. They are the man in the iron cage and there is now no escape. ‘The way of transgressors,’ the Scripture says, ‘is hard’ but it is never impossible for anyone who is exercised about it. Impossible for the defiantly careless, but not for the broken hearted. So we cannot be under the authority of the Spirit if we grieve or quench the Spirit.
v] By being filled with the Spirit. Ephesians 5:18.
If we grieve the Holy Spirit and we are in danger of quenching the Holy Spirit, there are certain things that we’ll consider to be an awful ‘drag’ to do. Let me explain what I mean. You hear people saying about some unpleasant duty that has to be done, like filling in tax forms, “What a drag!” I am saying that those who are not under the authority of the Spirit of God find themselves dragging themselves to pray; they are dragging themselves to services of worship; they are dragging themselves to read the Bible. There is a dark, cold, deadness about our spiritual lives; we shall hardly be able to call them ‘spiritual lives,’ and we certainly will not be doing what the next verses in Ephesians chapter 5 talk about - speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in our hearts to the Lord. We shan’t be feeling like that at all, we’ll think singing hymns is a miserable business; “How can I sing songs of praise if I’m not praising God? How can I sing hymns of prayer if I am not praying to God?” and so on. ‘Brethren,’ cries Paul, “be filled with the Spirit; don’t be filling yourself with wine.” The drunkard is never filled with the Spirit of God though he may be filled with a lot of other kinds of spirits, but not the Spirit of God.
Do you want your life to be under the authority of the loving Spirit of God? Have you ever prayed to be filled with the Spirit? You certainly need to do that if you have grieved the Spirit, and you specially need to do that if you are near to quenching the Spirit. Do plead with the Lord to be merciful to you and to fill you with his Spirit. Only then will you come under the authority of the Spirit. Surely it is right to seek a fuller measure of the Spirit’s authority over our lives. If you’ve begun to sense the pain of having grieved the Spirit or even have got to the point of almost quenching the Spirit, surely all Biblical reasons point you in this direction, you should be seeking a fuller measure of the Spirit’s influence in your life. ‘Lord, make me to be more spiritual, let me know more of the power of the Holy Spirit in my life, fill me with the Spirit. Help me to count for thee. Deliver me from going through the motions of religion. Kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart.’ The very word ‘fill’ indicates that we can be more or less full of the Holy Spirit, we need to be filled up to the brim, as it were, with the Holy Spirit.
We need to have our whole life influenced by the Holy Spirit. What do you tolerate in your life? Angry words, impatient words, depressing thoughts, envy, jealousy? Did you feel as you went along to a service too embarrassed to turn back and go home, yet not at all inclined to go there because of where you’ve been and what you’ve felt and done. You have a sort of feeling of hypocrisy about you. The devil will say, ‘Don’t pray to be filled with the Spirit;’ he will argue with you about this because he knows that this is a defeat for him; the more we know of the authority of the Holy Spirit in our lives the greater the defeat of the devil and the stronger you will be in resisting the devil.
‘Be filled!’ There is an urgency about it, says Paul, “Be filled with the Spirit!” Your past life, your unconverted life has been filled with all those other things. You were under the authority of the god of this world; you were under the lordship of sin. You will remember how you urgently went after this or that or the other, but now you have a new life to live, a new direction in your life, so be filled with the Spirit! You’ll discover that your life is being filled with those things which are truly of the Spirit of God. Pray through your temptations, and say, “Lord, sinful and unworthy as I am, I do long to be filled with the Spirit. I do want to be forgiven; I do want to know a closer walk with God; I do want to be filled with the Spirit.” That is a person under the authority of the Spirit. So don’t be put off, don’t be tempted not to pray, but mightily cry that you might be filled with the Spirit. Then you will find a fresh joy in worship, in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, your singing will be different. The sermons will be different; the praying will be different; the presence of Christian friends will be delightful. You are under the authority of the Spirit.
vi] By setting your mind on what the Spirit desires. Romans 8:5.
So what is your mind set on? What do you really think about, or what do you really care about? What concerns you the most? It is that kind of question that that phrase raises. What is it that is occupying your mind, your attention, your ambition, your desires, your plans and longings? What’s on your mind when you have nothing in particular to think about?
Is this the new direction of your life, that you want the things of the Spirit, your mind is concerned about the things of God? Those are the themes you want to know about and think about; they are the things that concern you now. If you are under the authority of the Spirit then that is how you are going to live. You’ll be seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. They’ll be the principal things in our lives.
To be spiritually minded is life, says Paul. There is a liveliness when you are filled with the Spirit. There is new life in your singing and in hearing the word preached. You are not a spectator. There is a greater clarity in your Christian testimony when you are spiritually minded. The truly important things are central when you are spiritually minded. A life of grieving the Spirit is not peaceful. If you are a child of God you will never have a peaceful conscience if you are grieving the Holy Spirit of God. It cannot be. To be spiritually minded is life and peace because when we are spiritually minded and the Holy Spirit is exercising his authority in our lives, we shall have that deepened sense of relationship with the Lord, reconciliation, peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
There is a new sense of that right relationship between you and the Lord. To be spiritually minded is life and peace. Let me ask you another question. I asked if you ever prayed or prayed frequently to be filled with the Spirit. Do you pray to be more spiritually minded? Actually that is a spiritually minded thing to do, it sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it, but that is a spiritually minded thing to do, to pray to be more spiritually minded, to have your affections set on spiritual things, things that are eternal, things that are of eternal consequence.
To be under the authority of the Spirit would make a wonderful difference to your own personal spiritual life. It would make a wonderful difference to your church life, to your relationship with other believers. You may be finding relationship with other believers at present particularly difficult; then you need to be exhorted to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and that is not easy sometimes. You need to pray, ‘Lord, make me so spiritually minded that I can live at peace with this person who is causing me such aggravation, and who is such a difficult person to get on with; do make me spiritually minded, keep me humble, keep me resilient in a sense, so I can just take things; if they want to throw things at me, let me just be quiet and calm about it, let them do it. Let me pray for them.’ Those under the authority of the Spirit pray like that. To be spiritually minded is life and peace. So by constant obedience to the Scripture, by repentant restoration, by neither grieving nor quenching the Holy Spirit of God, by being filled with the Spirit and minding the things of the Spirit you show that you are under the Spirit’s authority.
12th October 2008 GEOFF THOMAS.