The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, lesson 19 continued

We're back on the person and the work of the Holy Spirit. We're in chapter three, sanctification. We got the questions out this week, so everybody's gonna be super, super prepared. I know Ralph has, he's got a thumbs up going on there again. I can't tell if that's an accident. All right, Ralph, I'm gonna ask you the first question, because you're ready to go. He doesn't know that he's got the thumbs up. All right, so we're on lesson 16, I believe. And we've gone through the first, let me grab my notes one second. There we are. We left off on question number four. So let's jump back into, Lesson 16, question number four.

What does the word grieve mean when we grieve the Holy Spirit? Now this is stuff that we've covered to a degree in the class. We're talking about sanctification. In our previous question, what happens if we are careless and we fail to mortify the deeds of the body?

So just as a quick review, we use the mother-in-law suite. The idea that we kind of take the sin nature and we say, yeah, you were present in our lives for a long time as believers, now you're out in the mother-in-law suite and I'm redecorating this house. But occasionally, the knock on the door is not occasionally, it's quite persistent. But we invite the sin nature in, and through the process of temptation, we give permission to start redecorating the home, right? And pretty soon, it's as if the sin nature's moved in, you can't tell the difference from the main suite from the mother-in-law suite.

So we used some analogies to help us understand that That if we're not occupied with the Lord, we're occupied with our failures, right? We're occupied with those redecoration, renovation projects where we end up not being the one that gets our way, so to speak, because we're not trusting the Lord. in his truth and the word on the matter as opposed to the way that the sin nature occupies us with our own failures. So we get into question number four. That process grieves the Holy Spirit. We know that, but what is the word grief by way of review? What do we mean by grief? Okay. Earth to everyone. I'm not moving on. What do we mean by grief? What's that, Russ?

It's hard to imagine that God would be sad that he wept once and it just hurts him. It's just saddening for him when we don't have to do it. What do you guys think about that? Is it that he can no longer occupy us with the Lord then? Okay, so let's take the two answers that we've got so far. One is that he's saddened by it. The other is he can no longer occupy the mind of the believer in the same way, right?

I really appreciate what you said there, Russ, because the word grieve has this idea of making sorry or make sorrowful. Do we think about our choices to yield to the temptation of the sin nature and therefore grieve the Holy Spirit as having the effect on God that it brings sorrow to Him? You said it's hard to imagine, but is it true? Yeah. It is true. It's hard to imagine, but why does God get sad? so to speak.

I'm using very loose terms, but why is he sorrowful about that opportunity that we had to trust him, walk by the Spirit, and yet we walked by flesh? Why does that sadden him? I think it's partly, it starts with the fact how much he loves us. You grieve about someone that passes. It's a deep, deep, deep sadness. It's not just sad. It's, at least in our experience here. And so he loves us so much. And I think his love is about wanting us to be happy and fulfilled. And when we do, when we turn away, you know, he knows how hard it is for us. Yep. I think you're exactly right.

It breaks our fellowship too. You're right. our ability to commune with God until we confess our sins and get reconnected in fellowship. We break that communication in a way that we don't have a flowing relationship It's been like the clouds have come over in a sense and were hindered. He doesn't want us hindered. That's right. So we could say that the hindrance of sin, it's not so much that the that we're grieving the Holy Spirit to the degree that there's an anger or frustration there, it is to make sorrowful. And the sorrow comes as a result of not having that communion, that fellowship with the Lord. You hear that, JD? I do. Yeah. I think we're good now. It just kind of murmured there for a minute.

But yeah, so you can imagine God the Father as He walks with us and we engage in, here comes, you know, the knock at the door. It's that age old voice that we're so familiar with. We decide we know better than God and we're going to listen to that source as opposed to the true word of God around what we're dealing with and all of a sudden we break fellowship. We make the decision to do so and it results in a grievance, a sadness.

A sadness not that I don't believe the Lord the Father is focused on the sin. He's not sad about the sin. He's sad about the loss of fellowship that he has with his child. There's a difference there. So he's, I remember Vern saying, he's not wrapped up in your sin. He's wrapped up in not having an intimate relationship with you.

Yep, Mike. Is the grieving an emotional thing? Okay. I'm a part of the Holy Spirit or the Father. I mean, they're both pure spirits. They don't have souls. So, um, I think we look at grieving as a purely emotional response. Is that the same thing that the Spirit of God experiences or the Father experiences? What do we think?

Good question. Well, Christ, I mean, He wept. Yeah. But that was the man. But the Lord Jesus is a man and has a soul. So can you have what is grieving without emotion? Yeah, that's a good question. Disappointment. Well, it might look like a statistic, right?

Opportunity A is presented to you, right? You have A or B. Opportunity is presented and you have A or B. You choose A. Every time you choose A, that is in fellowship with the Lord and in communion with Him, you walk by the Spirit. Every time you choose B, you grieve the Spirit and you end up walking by the flesh. Over the course of history, you have 300 million opportunities of which 33% of those, you see where I'm getting at? I'm engaging in an exercise of mental statistics, right? So is walking with the Lord just statistic to him? So every failure, the other 70 or 66%, that's where he was sorrowful, but the 33%, he was not.

Interesting. So I'm wondering, is there an element of the Holy Spirit that, trying to describe something spiritual with an emotional viewpoint, is there an element of the Spirit that after all that God has done to reconcile us to himself, for us to not appreciate it, what they have done, has an adverse effect on their spirit? Yep. Let me read Isaiah 53, 10 to you, because you're hinting towards this.

But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief. Who's him? Jesus. Lord Jesus, that's right. So the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief. If he would render himself as a guilt offering, he will see his offspring, he will prolong his days. So what is the grief here? What's the context of grief in Isaiah? The cross of Christ? Yep. And what does the cross of Christ produce? Death. And what does death mean? Separation. What is God's reaction to separation of any kind?

Yeah. It grieves him. Yeah. Because that's not how he designed it. Even though the Lord was willing to crush and that's a temporary crush, right? putting him to grief, putting his son to grief as a guilt offering, he had to deal with the separation. And that brought about the result of, I would say, a perfect sorrow. I don't know how to clarify it any greater, but that separation caused grief. JD, think about this, in the Garden of Gethsemane, The Lord Jesus knew that that separation was coming the very next day. And it was so traumatic for him that he sweat blood.

How about the other side? And he's talking to the father. The father knows it's coming too. And it's, you know, he's in eternity. It isn't the next day for him, but he doesn't have a body, but he's grieving about that. And Lord Jesus, you can see the grief when he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? There's the separation right there, and it's really traumatic for him. And the Father's the one that turned away. He's the one that separated from the Lord Jesus when he was made sin for us. Right, when he bore our sins, exactly.

So I'm not trying to say that it's impossible for the spirit to be grieved because it says that he is grieved. I guess I'm just trying to get a handle on, well, what does that look like? Because it isn't like me grieving over my dog dying. Right. Let's take a basic principle here and just maybe add it to the discussion.

When we do not clarify the distinction between the creator and the creature, we tend to take emotions like this one, sorrow or grief, and we tend to take our experience of them as a creature and apply them to our creator. Is that fair to do? Is it okay to walk through life as a believer basically placing our understanding of grief and sorrow as a creature to our Creator's expression of grief. I'm gonna say no. Okay, I would say no as well.

And the reason is because of his attributes, right? He's sovereign. Are you sovereign? Nope. You know some stuff. You know the will of God to a degree, but you don't know his perfect will. You're not sovereign in that capacity. Righteous. He's perfectly right. So he doesn't have a sin experience of his own. It's always been, even for the son, it was placed on him as an offering. It wasn't his own.

Right. Righteousness, from a creator perspective, is far different than that from a creature perspective, until you understand that you've been placed in Christ, who is the creator. So we can go down the road, sovereignty, righteousness, justice, all of the omnis, and love. Right.

Yeah, JD, that's what I'm trying to think. So does God not have any emotion? Well, when you look at, like, with the Jewish people and Moses and his anger, you know, God is mad. He's going to wipe out the Jewish nation and start over with Moses. It's a righteous indignance, right? So it's not the same as mad from a creature perspective as we understand it. It's righteous. Yeah, just trying to go back.

I mean, Mike, trying to clarify, you said if there's no soul, there's no emotion. That you're saying that he doesn't have a soul. A property of my soul is mind, emotion, and will. Now, as a human being, I think I put an awful lot of emphasis on my soulish emotion.

We did the same thing for the Holy Spirit. Well, I guess I'm trying to figure it out. Like, God is love. So that, I mean, love is an emotion to me. And, I mean, we go in, you know, the four different agape, this, that, and the other, but it's an emotion. I can't separate love from being cold as ice or no emotion. You know God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. I mean they're all these are emotions by God anger You know wrath all these things are to me emotion.

So if he's just I mean he's a spirit. He's not a man so I think grieving the Holy Spirit grief is May not be the same as us or but but I think They're only words they can express in human terms kind of what he goes through yeah, so I mean grief to me is that you know if you know the zodiac is it's to What was it? Meaning meaning here in Ephesians 430 where it says do not grieve the Holy Spirit Meaning was to cause grief or offend. I mean, so I I guess God does have an emotion Love, you know, and then this fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, those are all. But you know, if when you define the word love, agape love, then you discover that agape love is resonant in the lover, no matter what the recipient of that love does, it doesn't change the intensity with which the lover loves.

Right, but I'm just saying it's an emotion, it's an emotional response. So would you attach a welcome to spirit? Yeah, that's what I guess. I mean, well, if God isn't only spirit, he's got anger, he's got love, he's got all these different attributes that we at least somehow through the English language or Greek or whatever, you know, trying to express the same in human terms. Right. So how does God, how does God feel about evil? Okay. Is that a feeling? Yeah.

Well, it's like, what about anger? You know, he'd be angered, you know. Well, maybe we ought to distinguish between feeling and emotion. Well, I think the biggest distinction, first of all, at least for me, is the creator-creature distinction. Because if we bring the definition into a creature perspective, we're limited. Right? But we know that God abhors sin, right? And when He looks at us as an unbeliever, Does he still love that unbeliever? Yeah, he does. He does. Right. But is it does he still abhor the sin of the unbeliever? Yes. Yes. OK.

So I was going to say in the time frame just before God had known his family get on the ark. He said he was sorry that he'd made man and upset with sin that he had every living thing, every human being, man, woman, and child destroyed, and he did start over. Everybody's waiting for me to respond, and I'm waiting for Mike to respond.

Well, it's interesting that what God did with Noah is that he started over in a sense that he just used the same human being to start over with. When he really started over was in the resurrection of Christ, when there was a new creation. And so now we have a race of human beings who are sinless. those that are in Christ from a positional standpoint. And that's, I guess, the ultimate remedy was to deal with us in such a way to recreate us in Christ resurrected so that all the entire makeup of that race of man is pleasing to him. So, you know, I had another thought about emotion. I remember When my brother died, I went through a time where I just had an incredible sense of loss, you know?

Driving down the road, it just overwhelmed me. And I didn't pump it up or anything, it just was there. But after a while, you know, and praying about it and stuff, it went away. And I used to think, well, that's way more than my being upset about something or being emotional about something.

There was a sense of loss there that was really rooted in something even I couldn't explain. So I understand about, to some degree, all that God went through to reconcile man back to himself and to have him not in the least well appreciated, or for believers who have been saved and reconciled to operate like they didn't appreciate it, is something that's even maybe stronger than a motion of anger or something like that. It's really interesting. I think we all experience in different degrees and at different times, what loss does to our hearts emotionally, right? So let's, I do not want to move on from this, but I want to give some additional context with a couple of questions here.

So let's keep that as the forefront of one of our big questions as we think about this. But in Isaiah, it talks about how the Lord has put his son to grief when he bore our sins. We just talked about that. So the question that right out brings up is, is it possible that we should now cause pain to the blessed spirit of God? Oh, how we should, or how it should make us hate and up or all forms of sin. Think about that. Is it possible that we should now cause pain? So here we have a situation where the Lord has provided a guilt offering on behalf of his son who bore our sins.

And yet here we are, not walking by fellowship, by faith. What's happening in our heart? Do we think, oh man, this is really not good for me right now, because look what I did to myself. I got myself at the bottom of the barrel or something. But what's going on there?

What we oftentimes don't think about is the pain that it is causing to the Lord because of what He did. by offering his son as our sacrifice. And here we are not trusting the new life that he's given to us. And it is a loss of opportunity. It's a loss of opportunity. It's a loss of intimacy. It's just like a father when a child through, again, this is a creature analogy, but the prodigal son. You know, there's a sorrow when our children walk away. And there's a patience that comes with that.

But there's something that goes on in this grieving process that I think question number five is going to give us some additional insight into. So the question number five says, what does the Holy Spirit do in this case? And I came up with an additional question, is grieving the Spirit mercy? Is grieving the Spirit what? The potential of us grieving the Holy Spirit, that's a reality for us as believers.

The Bible lays that out very clearly in Galatians. We'll talk about that some more. So it's a reality, but how does it relate to mercy? What's the purpose of it? I was just going to say it's a process. It's impossible for us, not all, to grieve the Holy Spirit that points in our walk. And the Holy Spirit's grieved and we receive trials. And that's the mercy, in a sense, because he's growing us up and he's getting us more perfected in our condition. And that's one way to look at it, maybe. I think you're right. So how many times? Go ahead, Mike.

It's going to say part of that grieving process from the believer's understanding is that if I'm one of those law-bound, self-centered believers, I don't care much about grieving the spirit. All I care about is what he's done for me lately, you know.

The word of God is designed and the spirit of God's work is designed to reveal personally and intimately the person of the Lord Jesus and to understand number one, not number one who he is, but also what he's done and his character. And so we become acquainted with him and we love him because obviously he first loved us. Anybody that you have in your life that you love, that you grieve, has an effect on you. But if you don't know them very well, it has no effect on you at all. That's right. So let me read this from right out.

How many times we, as a child of God, have been brought to the Lord by the consciousness of having grieved the Holy Spirit? Have we been in that? We've been brought to the consciousness with, yep. And all of a sudden, His peace is gone, His communion has ceased, we're miserable until we judge the evil, confess and forsake it. Instead of going on in carelessness, only to fall deeper and deeper into sin, He is made to feel the seriousness of that which blocks the communion between the Spirit and Himself. Here, doubtless, we have the work of the Spirit and applying the Word to heart and conscience. So the sin is judged, confession made, and joy is restored. So where does, if we didn't have the conviction of the Holy Spirit through the grieving process, what would be our approach to life at that stage? No grieving. Why is grieving merciful, a merciful act of God?

Because without that lack of fellowship, you wouldn't know the opportunities that you were missing to have intimacy with your Savior. You wouldn't be aware of it, but you are very aware. And without that awareness of what the results are causing in your fellowship with the Lord, What's the, if joy isn't broken, if communion isn't broken, if you're not miserable by walking by the flesh, then why not walk by the flesh?

Now, what is mercy? Mercy is not getting something that you deserve, right? Could God let us, let the prodigal son just take off and go? You deserve whatever you get. Go on. Hit the door. Don't expect it to come back. There's plenty of people that think that fellowship is like that. That's not what's going on in our Savior's mind. That's not the way our Creator thinks about a loss of fellowship.

It grieves Him. Because I want you, God says. I want you. The sin is getting in the way, and I want you. Without that, we're not wanted. We're out. And what are we left to? Our own device, right? Yeah. I do think, though, J.D., right there, that there is... How do I say this?

In any body of believers, there has to be this growing in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus, more so than just learning the traditions and the doctrine and all of that. There has to be this growing fellowship between the individual believer and the Lord Jesus himself, which is the great work of the Holy Spirit. And that also translates into fellowship with one another. So body believers, that's why this COVID thing is so devastating because it, you know, to some degree has eliminated fellowship amongst believers because we do it remotely like we're doing now. But the great thing is, is that no matter how the world tries, they can't stick Zoom between us and the spirit of God. So it's great.

But the point, again, back to my point, it's all designed for us to know Christ, you know, to know him intimately and personally enough and well enough and his grace well enough and that he loves us well enough that when we do sin, it's an issue with us. I think if I'm a self-centered Christian, the only time I'm worried about my sins is if I don't get what I want. I look at God as just a big screwdriver in the sky to fix all my problems.

Right. An understanding that there is the creator creature distinction in terms of his attributes and how he he manages But he does he does desire for us to know that there is a star on his behalf And it has to do with that separation of fellowship in this case, right? Some people would say okay. Well, that's just the norm.

That's the Christian life What do you think about that this one's hard for me because I tend to It's just a way of assigning priority in my thinking, maybe not even priority, but emphasis, is that, is this more about the norm of walking by the flesh that everyone goes through, just kind of the ups and downs, this is just what's going on?

Or is this something that I realized was not intended for me? that God doesn't desire that I walk by the flesh because it has a result in me losing fellowship with Him and I lose my life. I lose the focus of it. I don't lose it in the sense that, not from an eternal perspective, but I lose my fellowship. So it's a poor kind of life, to be honest.

And I had to really think this through personally, because a lot of times I would, you know, I have all my pet sins, just like everyone does. And it's like, yeah, it's just the norm. But I'm so glad that God is gracious and he welcomes me back in fellowship through the process of confession. But this is the norm. And I would kind of always add that little caveat, and I still do sometimes, I think we all do, if we're honest with ourselves, this is just normal. Give yourself a break. And it's not so much that grace isn't present and you don't give yourself a break, so to speak, but it's not the norm.

And what we do is we get so used to this you know, the sin, break fellowship, confess, restore fellowship, and we get into this circle, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, over and over and over. And we think, oh, so good that God would hear me in my confession and restore me to fellowship that I do it so often that I take part in that process on a regular basis and think that that's the norm.

Ever been there? Yeah. You know, when you were talking, I was thinking about Adam in the garden. Once he sinned, he went and hid, which is what we do. But who pursued who? No, God pursued him, and I think that part of God's character never changes. How are we pursued? How do we pursue? How are we pursued? Oh, yeah. Adam was pursued. How are you pursued? By the Spirit. That's right.

This grieving process is both gracious and merciful for the purposes of turning your eyes away from yourself, the creature, and back to your Creator and all of His loving attributes. So if we think about it, it's actually kind of a dreadful state for us as believers to think of spiritual hardness as the norm. What hope do we really have? If that's the norm, the best we have is a vicious cycle for the days that we have left on this earth. That's the best you get. Yeah, but isn't it some way the norm in a sense that I mean, for goodness sakes, 40 or 50 years of being a Christian, and I'm still... wanting to be in God's presence 24-7, and that sin creeps in, and it is kind of the norm for me.

It's a process of growing in Christ, and it's that way for all of us, and I just look at it. God set it up that way, and thank goodness He's graceful. I grieve Him. I'm sorry that I grieve Him, but then He sends a trial, and I struggle, and I go to Him, and It's this whole process. And someone give me a how to book not to do that anymore. Well, let's take the question.

What does the word normal mean? In this context, we'll get it. We'll just don't answer the question outside of the context. So what's the normal Christian life? To walk in the spirit. OK, I agree. I'd like to think normal is is being in God's presence. Yeah. Everything else abnormal.

So that's what I mean by the vicious cycle is not the norm. Yes, it's a reality, and yes, every single believer goes through that process in varying degrees, but it's not the norm because the standard is God's life, not our life. So if we look at this process and we think, oh, this is what I'm going through, God says, that's not your reality. You're walking by spiritual insanity right now out of fellowship. That's not the norm. That's not reality.

The reality is that I've given you a new life. And by faith, you are able to live this life. And I'll do it through you. Don't worry about it. I got this. But if we're focused on the norm of the cycle, and I understand where you're coming from, it's not so much the reality of what we experience by defining what's the norm of the Christian life, it's how God defines it. He says, this is what is meant for you based on the fact that you have the life of my son.

JD, one of the things, and I think that kind of blends in with what you're saying, is when we sin, and I think most Christians focus on the sin and how bad it is and all this, It's paid for, it's done. We're looking at it from our side, and how bad, and we think about how bad it is, and what we did, and da da da da da da da da da. God's done with it. The only thing we should look at is the loss of fellowship. I think a lot of people focus on, oh, gee, I'm so bad today. One, did God allow you to sin? Yes, he did. Is he using it for his purposes? Yes. I think so many believers are looking at the sin and all how terrible it is. God's done with it. God doesn't even see it anymore. He's paid for it.

The more we focus on our sin and how bad it is and what we've done, that's where we lose the fellowship. I think the quick restoration is God's done with it. You know, why am I dwelling on it? And I think we spend so much time thinking about how bad our sin is when we should be thinking about how good God's love is, and his intimacy, and his care, and the spirit. And I just think so many people look on the sinful side. God's done with it.

And yet it's the miracle of the Christian walk. I mean, we all agree with you. We all read these verses and we have them in our heart, but yet our bodies are so sinful. Our flesh just is sin and it tricks us back into moving our eyes a little bit sometimes. Maybe with certain people a lot and other people a little bit less, but there we are.

And God, thank goodness for grace. He set the whole system up for us to grow in grace. I think it's just the times that we look at worrying about the sin, and God's done with it. And I think that's the, you know, going back to our root, our foundation, you know, reckon yourself dead unto sin and alive unto God. You know, we're dead unto it.

Don't let it ruin you. Don't let it take more than two seconds of your time. I agree with you, Courtney, 100%. I reckon myself dead every day, and yet here comes sin creeping in. And it's like, how to? I would add that right there is the issue. Am I taking up with the Lord Jesus so much that I'm not even conscious of myself? Because if I'm thinking about myself and all the blessings I'm in, I still haven't figured it out. The issue is the Lord Jesus himself. That he occupies my time, my thought process, everything that goes on with me.

And once that stops, even if it's a good thing, I'm out of fellowship. And that's kind of what I'm saying, Mike, too. If we focus on our sins, we're not focusing on the Lord. And if we're worried about all the sins we do, we're not focusing on the Lord. He's done with it. He's done with it. And Miles Stamford used to say, if you're concerned about your spiritual growth, you haven't figured it out yet. Yeah. Why? Wrong focus. Is this all about you? Wrong focus. Yeah.

And so I think what the Lord Jesus' intent and the Spirit's intent is, is to occupy us with Christ. Right. So He just fills up what we're doing. And the more we focus on our sin, the more we're not focusing on Him. And the flesh is just reveling in that.

Yeah. If you sin, you're done with it. God's done with it. Yeah. As long as I can keep you away from Christ, I've accomplished my purpose, right? Yeah. I mean, there's consequences. If you go out and shoot somebody, there are going to be consequences. But the sin is done with. He's done with it. Or if I can get you under doing a whole bunch of spiritual push-ups, same dance. Exactly. I'm worried about all this. God's not worried about it. He's done with it. Yeah. So why does Rideout say, but he can no longer occupy us with... Yeah, after we've grieved the Holy Spirit. Why does Rideout say, but he can no longer occupy us with our Lord, he must occupy us with our failures?

Think about regret. Shame. Those are the kinds of results that walking by the flesh produces. I regret it. I'm shameful about it. That's the result. So he can't occupy us in regret and shame and so forth, because he has joy and peace and rest for your soul, not regret and shame, right? He doesn't operate in that realm. That's sin. That's the results of sin, right? You mean if I'm not more sorry about my sin than you are, I don't get restored sooner?

Possibly. No, I'm just kidding. So we've reached time, unfortunately, because I feel like we're getting into some of the heart of what this lesson is really about. Next week, we're going to look at this example of a farmer overcoming evil with good. I really want to take some of the comments that were mentioned here in the class today and continue to unpack those next week with some of these other questions, and definitely that's where we're going to get into Galatians 5 and break that down a little bit.

But in the meantime, let's end on the note of fellowship with one another and the joy that comes from walking with the Lord. So let's pray, and we'll go about our Father, how we thank you for your truth. We thank you, first of all, that not only did you send your son to bear our own sins and bring us into a relationship with you, but you continually pursue us as only a loving father could. And by that process, Lord, through fellowship, we're able to experience the joy and the peace and ultimately the very life that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we know that when we choose to walk out of fellowship and grieve your Spirit, and not call sin what it is and understand how it does grieve you, we lose opportunity to find the peace and the joy that comes from walking with you. And so I pray that we would just be conscious of that and that we would start to think through what your word says here and the joy that it is to know that you restore us every single time with open arms and we thank you for that kind of love. We just pray for the next hour and just that Your Word would be accurately represented and that we would be just illuminated by Your Holy Spirit. It's in Your name we pray. Amen.