Person & Work of the Holy Spirit
Mike Doyle · Nov 3, 2013
Holy Spirit (2013), No. 43
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49264546698

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

All right. A little update on the class. The book has seven lectures or chapters. We have finished five. It took us 10 months to do five chapters. We're moving kind of fast. We have two chapters to go and two months to do it. So we're probably going to speed up a little bit so that we can.

I would hate to get to the last week to do with December and still have a lot of material to cover. Because in January one, we switch over again to new new classes. So and I've I've I've got I've got all the questions for chapter six for a lesson. Twenty three's in there. So the next three weeks, three or four weeks, we'll try to get through lesson six and then seven.

I don't think it's going to take that long because we have so much. information now about the Holy Spirit and who he is and especially what his work is, that we can probably move through it a little faster. So just to let you know, if it seems like we might be going a little fast, why we're doing it that way. Having said all of that, it's always been our intent that the Spirit of God leads the class, so if it doesn't get done, it doesn't get done. We're comfortable. Okay. We're at chapter 6. Lesson 21, we started messing with it last week.

Let's define the three basic topics of this chapter are inspiration, enlightenment and prophecy. So how would you define inspiration? Divine authorship and protection of the word. Okay, has to do with authorship. that the writers of the word of God were inspired by God and the perfection of the word through the work of the Holy Spirit through these men. It's a perfect book. Perfect.

We'll spend more time on that. That's what inspiration is. So don't come in here some morning and tell me you've been inspired because I don't believe you. How about enlightenment? What does that mean? Somebody other than Francis gets to answer that.

Understanding. Unfolding our understanding. Unfolding our understanding. Here's the deal. You read a verse of scripture. and you don't understand it, so then you read it again, and you read it again, and you read it again, and about the ninth time you think you might have a handle on it. Is that inspiration? That's hard to study. Could be.

Well, the Holy Spirit's involved too, if you're a believer. Yeah. So the point that I'm trying to make is that you can read it 4,000 times, and if the Spirit of God doesn't illuminate you, You're just wasting your time. Now that's not to say that when a believer is in the word of God that he isn't illuminating because he is. You see that? He is illuminating. But I think it's important for us to understand that illumination sometimes does not mean logical and philosophical treatises of understanding. More than likely what it means is a revelation of the person of Christ. See that?

Would that go along with all scripture's foolishness to the unbelievers? Yes. The natural man perceives not the things of the Spirit of God, they're foolishness unto him. He can't know them. It doesn't matter how much he wants to know them, he cannot know them. Why?

You have to have the capacity to know the word of God. You have to be born anew. You have to have a new life in order to understand. Spirits of discernment. And I think that we as believers, especially those who spend time in the word, the things that you will know, and he says this, that the babe in Christ has greater understanding than someone who has has 14 degrees and has studied all their life. Do you know who a really good example of that is? Spiros Zoriades. Some of you know who he is. He is a Greek scholar and Donna uses his bible. This guy is brilliant.

But he knows nothing about identification, position, condition, grace because his focus has been on the exact translation of the Greek language. He focused on language rather than Christ. I think he is a believer But he hasn't gone beyond the basic salvation information. So when he starts to illuminate you about Romans 6, he doesn't get it. He doesn't get it. OK. Well we haven't, and I say we. I never heard about condition, position and identification. But I believed.

But do you know, Mary and I were talking about this, that it seems like that this is coming forward in different places, what you're teaching. It is. The interesting thing about grace, position, condition, identification, is that it seems to me that it is communicated in small environments. You won't hear it taught from the pulpit. There are some books around, yeah, but the understanding of this is almost like from me to you, and it's you to Wanda, and to Mary, and that's the way the Lord does it. Which I think is kind of cool.

Because it's information that when you hear it and understand it and you see it in the word, boy the freedom is just incredible. It's so cool. But it doesn't seem to be, and I have never known the Lord other than maybe the Plymouth Brethren for 20 or 30 years, there has never been a big revival of identification. There just never has been one. Isn't that the way it was in Paul's day? Oh, sure. Yeah. Well, even Peter said this Paul guy, you know, he's an apostle and we don't want to always get what he's talking about. I was just thinking what you said about Spiriotus. Spiriotus. Spiriotus.

That, you know, could it be also true that God or the Holy Spirit might not enlighten this guy so that he can can focus on doing like exact translation? Because maybe if he had it, he would be like, whoo. Maybe. I mean, you know, there's Roberts, isn't Roberts one of the other guys from these different Greek geeks, you know, it's not that, you know, I don't discount the understanding of language and, and Rideout makes a really aggressive point about how important it is to be educated. But education is not in place of illumination. And that's where the danger is.

I mentioned when Hal used to do the Bible study out at Buckley, that he'd come back just lit up, that he'd just come back from his Greek class, and he understood this new revelation. Hal used to be a teacher here and a pastor too. But this guy that was teaching Greek was a non-believer. But he could teach how and how would just be freaking out about how cool what he'd learned. He was just on fire about it. This guy would just teach him facts, just cold facts. It would just turn how Lloyd. All right.

The third the third definition is and this is going to be interesting because right out kind of goes at this a little different than you probably read before. The third issue is prophecy. This is right out. Explain or try to define prophecy. Somebody other than Francis. Application to conscience and heart for practical uses. So the application of the words, the illumination, the enlightenment that you have to your conscience and to your heart for practical use. And that will be a couple of weeks from now when we get in and tear that up.

It's going to be kind of fun because I think, I must be honest with you, I've always thought of it that way, but I'm in a minority and I've had several arguments with guys that say that prophecy is no longer, it's a spiritual gift that's... Not that my experience verifies the word, but I've known people who have the ability to walk up to you and apply the word to your life. You knew it all along, but there was an application presented to you by this person that really had an effect on how you lived, non-offensively. And it was like, oh yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. you know, or they challenged you to think about what you were doing or not.

It seems like the definition when I read this was it's synonymous almost with the gift of wisdom, which is wisdom is always the application of knowledge, the gift of knowledge, but then wisdom with the application of knowledge. And so it seemed like his definition was more like wisdom. the skillful application of knowledge or the word or something like that.

I think lesson 23, I just put it in the box today. It's about prophecy and what he has to say. Okay, question 2. 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17. And 2 Peter 1, 20 and 21. What three things are told in these verses that we learn about all scripture? So let's, rather than have you guess, somebody read 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, and somebody else other than Francis. Going home. Read 2 Peter 1, 20 and 21.

All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training But know this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. So the question is, what three things are told us in these verses about all scripture? The first one is that all scripture is of divine origin, which means it's inspired. All scripture is of divine origin.

Two, that it has been given to us for a purpose. If you know a little grammar, One of the things you find in reading the word of God is that you'll go along and you'll see a positional truth. And then there comes this thing called a purpose clause. And it will say to you, based on this information, here's the purpose that it's been given. It doesn't say it like that. But you will see, oh yeah, this is why he said what he said or gave us this truth right here. And the purpose is for our profit and the unfolding of the mind of God. Now that just blows me away. Why would God even bother? Why would he even bother to unfold his mind to us?

Relationship. Yeah. Relationship. You can't have a relationship. It's like everybody is complaining now that our society is going to hell in a handbag because we are all using electronic media to communicate. We are texting We're emailing, we're doing all of this. Mr. Wizard over here. Hey, when you have a family gathering, everybody is looking at their phones rather than talking to each other.

Can I unfold to you the mind of God if I'm texting you? Or my mind? Because I'm careful about how I'm perceived. I'm on Facebook and Randy is one of my friends and he changes his photograph every week, every day. One of these days the real Randy is going to show up.

So the thing is that God has given us his spirit and his word to do what? to communicate with us who he is, what his mind is, and it's not electronic, it's one on one, spiritual level and soulless level, kind of cool, that's what the word is for. What's the third thing? And this is really important, that the spirit of God is the author, but he made use of human instruments in giving us the word of God. does a good job I think of persuading his audience how important it is to understand that God is the author of the word and because he is the author of the word, the word itself lines up with who God is.

It is perfect. There is not one mistake in it anywhere. Anywhere. He even goes through lots of apparent, oh gee, The Old Testament said this, the New Testament repeated it, but it kind of didn't repeat the whole thing, it added to it, and that means there's error. There's no error in the Word of God. None. None.

So those three things. It has divine origin, it's inspired. The purpose is for our profit in unfolding the mind of God, and the Holy Spirit is the author, but he used human instruments. So, question three. What's the great basis of all our knowledge of the Word of God. It is God, not man, who has spoken. Yeah, that's exactly the point. You hear that? It is God, not man, who has spoken.

It's His Word. It's His Word. So when you open up your Bible, no matter where you're reading, you're reading God's Word. It's His Word. No wonder there's so much, over the centuries there's been such great attacks on the Bible. And in the dark ages they try to hide it all. But it's God's word.

And that's a really, I mean, you say, oh yeah, we all know that. But I don't know if we really recognize the significance that God himself has given us his word. Everything that he wants us to know is there. It eclipses all other facts, however true they may be.

We lose sight for the time being, from time to time, manner and instruments, but the Lord has spoken." That's really important to understand when you look at your Bible tonight, today, tomorrow. You're reading what God wrote through human instruments. It's His Word. It's not somebody's opinion. It's not the New York Times. It's not the Denver Post. It's God's word.

Think about what he's done. He's given us the spirit so that we can understand it. So that when you get illuminated, you can understand what he's saying. Not because you've read it 15 times. What do you do? If you're reading the word of God and you, well I don't get what he's saying here.

This is my opinion. What should you do about that? Should you say, well the class is going to be on Sunday and I better have the answer to this. So I'm going to keep at it until I get it. Probably pray about it. Talk to God. Would there ever be a time where God, having you well in hand in terms of spiritual growth, you're just not ready to understand? So he isn't going to show you that now? Sure. And your studying it really diligently isn't going to change it. What is that? What am I really saying?

That there is a dependency on us, on the spirit of God to reveal what he means in the word. And he is more anxious and more eager to reveal this to us than we are to know it. But he has got a way that he is going to do it so that he is glorified and we are conformed in the process. Because sometimes we get really curious about a verse from an intellectual standpoint because we really want to know the answer. And maybe that isn't what the Lord has in mind. So there is a dependency that is fostered in us as we spend time in the Word that the Spirit of God is bringing us along probably faster than we even dreamed we were being brought along.

You know I was reading about the life of Sebastian Bach during Luther's day. way back in the 1600s and he came to the conclusion that reason was empty and blah and that the spirit and faith in God was soaring and uplifting just like the music that he was playing. You know that's really an important point. Part of this dynamic that's gone on in our block this week is we have two other widows that live in the block and one's a Catholic And the other one is Greek Orthodox. And a Catholic lady invited me in to talk to me a little bit because she wanted to get updated on what the progress of the man was. And she gave me a paper to read about 1516 or whatever Luther did and from the Catholic viewpoint. And that's exactly what the paper was.

It had no wisdom in it. And no uplifting reasons? Nothing uplifting. I thought all about this council of Trent and how they reaffirmed and really what they thought Luther was trying to do was eliminate abuses in the Catholic Church. That wasn't what he was up to. And they didn't get it. They didn't understand what he was doing.

So, interesting. Why is it We probably already answered this. Why is it that babes in Christ understand so much more than the whys of this world? They've accepted the truth. What's that? They've accepted the truth. Okay, that's another way of saying they believe. And because you believe the word of God, you understand a lot more.

If you want to watch the portrayal of the foolish, Watch the news. Watch the politics. There isn't a bigger group of fools in the world than our politicians. They are foolish people. They really are. And you know what? The only ones that make any sense are the ones that aren't believers. And even they have been compromised. I was thinking too about why is it that babes understand so much more. Maybe that's who God wants to give it to, too. You know, from the other way around, it's like... Well, think about this.

That 1 Corinthians verse, that the natural man doesn't perceive the things of the Spirit of God, their foolishness, and you can't know them. It would be totally inconsistent with the character of God to reveal anything to the natural man. Why? He's at enmity with God. You know, I ask this question all the time.

When the Lord Jesus died on the cross, he paid the penalty for your sins and took care of the guilt of your sins, right? What did he do with you as a sinner? What did he do? Did he forgive you, the sinner? No, he didn't. He crucified you. That's exactly right. He crucified you. Why did you need to be crucified? You had to die. Why did you have to die?

To live again. Because you're in enmity with God. That's true. That's why. He didn't fix you up, he got rid of you. And replaced you in Christ. Does that make sense? Yes. When the Word of God says that if any man be in Christ he's a new creation, that new creation isn't a fix and flip. That's not what it is. It's a brand new build. There's no mold under the paint. That's exactly right. There's no mold under the paint.

In the verses right before we were talking about the natural man, in verse 12, Paul writes, Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God. That's 1 Corinthians 2.12. And right after the verse is the natural man. Right after the natural man is that.

Isn't it that it has never my hand can't be seen. It's never entered into his mind the things that God has in store for those who love him. Isn't that right after it. Yep. But God 16 we have the mind of Christ. I mean I've run into Christians that quote that verse. And I said, wait a minute, you didn't read the next part. The next part says that God has revealed them unto us. He has revealed to us the things he has in store for those who are in him. Yeah. No excuses.

Go back to actually what Holly said. And I don't know if saying that babes have more knowledge. I don't agree with that. I think babes are innocent. and don't have as much of a tainting. And if you look at the growth process, the growth process is innocence and very limited. And as you grow older, you pick up all the bad habits and all the different things. And if you look at the growth of a believer, innocence, belief in that you're excited about who you are, the new life, and then there's that And the growth process is identifying the old man and getting, understanding who that is. And I think then you have, as you understand that, there's more knowledge of who you are in Christ.

And it was just a statement that babes have more knowledge. I don't know if they have more. I said that? Yeah. I mean, it's not like God is wanting to give babes Maybe understanding because they don't have that pride. Whereas someone who is knowledgeable thinks it's their own. And so why would God want to give you more when you're just going to use it for your own self-glory?

And that's what I'm saying. It's the innocence of the brand new babe in Christ. And there's that exuberance, the excitement. And then there's the growth process beyond that. And as you grow, you don't teach calculus to a second year old, or a second grader. I mean, you get more and you grow through that.

And I think that's the same analogy as a believer. I mean, you have that initial, which is salvation and a new life, and hopefully, you know, identification will help you grow immediately. But there's millions of believers who don't have that, who stay in the nursery for a long time. It's always been my contention that as you know the identification, that's when real growth begins to happen. And you get out of helping the old man, the fix and flip and the patch ups and all that. You understand that and that's when you start to grow. But would you compare the new believer with the natural man in terms of understanding truth?

He knows or she knows way more truth than the natural man does. And how educated? Because he can't know. Carol? Oh, you just kind of finally said what I was going to say. To me, the babe in Christ is a believer, and the wives of the world are not believers. And so the babe, even though they don't know much about God and being a Christian yet, they know truth. Yeah, I'm standing over this guy's house. These other guys don't have a clue. And that's what I'm thinking. The foolishness of the cross that God chose to save those who would believe. Is there anything more important to that guy in that bed than that information? Nothing. Nothing. There's nothing more important than that information.

When Courtney was saying that back to how Malloy, the guy who pretty much got all this position, condition, identification, he was saying when he was first gotten saved, he was listening to that J. J. Bernard McGee. And they'd always he'd gotten saved, but they'd always had a Friday night poker thing.

And maybe after he got saved, he was having the poker games, smoking cigars and he just didn't realize that. Some of the stuff he's doing is such a babe in Christ. He just didn't. He had to learn that, you know, maybe I shouldn't be. Trying to win all my friend's money and smoking ten cigars a night. He was sitting there drinking a scotch cigar in his hand playing poker, witnessing Christ to the poker player across the table, called him a hypocrite. And it was like, oh, yeah. He didn't do any of those things after that day.

So just as God breathed into Adam's nostrils, so he breathed into the word. What does that mean? The Bible is a living book? Yeah. Right now it says that all scripture is given by inspiration and inspiration of God means God breathed. When did God breathe into Adam? The breath of life. So the word is alive. And his image. And so the word is alive. It may be written in English on a page in front of you, but those words are alive.

I was wondering if it's even spiritual life, because animals have life, and trees have life, and stuff like that. That verse in Genesis, the word life is plural. So he breathed more than just one life into Adam. Spiritual life, human life, the breath of life.

1 Timothy 4, 1 Paul uses the word expressly or explicitly. What does the word tell us about the word of God? Here is the verse. Now the spirit speaks expressly or explicitly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, etc. What does that word expressly mean?

Clear and specific. Pretty good. Showing the distinctness and the definitiveness of the word of God. There's nothing vague or uncertain about it. Every statement has a definite meaning. Every statement has a definite meaning. One of the interesting things about contemporary authors is that there's lots of fill. You read books, you read even theological books, they're pages filled with fills. Or repetition. Stuff like that. That was an amazing thing to me when I was given the green letters.

If you've ever read that, there's no fill in that thing. Of course it took them 20 years to write it. Absolutely no feel at all. The word of God has nothing, not a single sentence that's wasted. Understand what I mean by that? That every single verse has a purpose.

But what about people that haven't heard this? I still am concerned about that book that we read, Down the River. What's going on down the river? Because these things are not like where I grew up. I never heard of any of that. I mean, like your brother in going to lessons to become a Catholic, well he grew up in Catholicism. Boy, I look at that. Boy, does he get bled down in Primrose Lane. There's a big trap door at the end that goes right to hell. So what do you do? That's a really good question. We all have the information about salvation, right? Everybody knows what the gospel is. And we all are looking for opportunities to share the gospel with non-believers.

But what you find, I think, as a growing believer, especially if you become aware of and settle down into what we call the growth groups, Then the ministry changes. It changes from the lost to the saved. And so now you look around and think gee, my brothers and sisters in Christ, if they knew this information, how free they would be. And so you start out on a career just like you did when you were a young evangelist telling the right thing to the wrong people.

So what do you look for? I think this is the key. You look for a hungry heart. You look for somebody that comes in your life that has a need. That's the one you want to talk to. Same thing with the lost. I'm perceiving my neighbor with her husband just dying. She's got need. Right now. Two weeks ago she didn't have any need, or she's got it now.

So we'll see. And sometimes you have to wait for the Lord, especially in your own family. You have to wait for the Lord to create the need in their life. And trust me, He'll do it. He'll do it. And all of that religious nonsense that they've been adhering to all this time doesn't hold them up in a crisis. that's the opportunity.

So does the scripture contain the word of God plus other matters also? Yes. I have a yes and I have a no. Of course I'll be wrong. The answer is that there's lots of other information in there, historical information and that kind of thing, but every single word is the word of God and there isn't anything other than the word of God.

He said the word was made by a copyist and there were human errors but it didn't but the truth of God came through the Holy Spirit. Isn't that interesting. You know we don't have any Greek geeks in this class do we? We have some people who study Greek. But the definition is that the word of God is inherent in the original. Now some people think that King James is the original. So here I am, I don't have any talent for languages at all. I took Spanish four years and still can't say hello. I just don't have an aptitude for languages. But how come I know stuff in the word of God? I think it has more to do with interest than aptitude. Where did the interest come from? It comes from God. That's right. So the thing is that, again, I'm not discounting a Greek student.

Bless their hearts, I'm really glad we have them because they, like the brief teacher with Hal Malloy, taught him things, even though the guy wasn't a believer, but because he was spiritually alive and illuminated, he made the connections right away.

I think it's important to understand that the spirit as author of the scripture also works throughout history to preserve the scripture. So that we don't have to look at it and go, I wonder if this is what God really said and meant. Because that's one of the biggest problems we have today with inerrancy. is that we say ok the scripture is inerrant well the original autographs or manuscripts are inerrant but then after that everything is up in the air like the word of God has just been butchered to death and what we've got now is a terrible terrible representation of what was given and inspired. Can you and I trust this reading a transliteration of the Bible like the NIV that God would use it to reveal, illuminate us?

Absolutely we can. Sure we can. Because it's spiritually discerned. That's right. That's your last question. But then you hear all these people that are like, oh there are different publishers that are coming out with new versions to get a one world religion and so they're watering down the Bible, calling it the Bible. Or they're taking all the sexual distinctions out of it. Whatever. Or why do we have so many denominations? Why is there reform theology and dispensational theology? Why all of that? And in the middle of that morass can you learn and know the truth and rest in it?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. There is the exegesis of the word, where you go into the word and you allow the word of God to teach you. There is an interceding into the word where you have already got a theology or your mind made up and you go into the word to find verses that will back up what you already think. And sometimes that's the way you find out whether so and so's theology is really relevant or not is how far he's willing to stretch that rubber band of the word to make it say what he wants it to say rather than having the spirit of God reveal to you what it is saying. I like to think that in the end of all that hoopla going on, it's just really when you're sitting down with your Bible, it's just you and God.

That's right. You and the Lord. That's it. Yeah. And He reveals to you. Sure. And you know the truth. You do know. Yeah. And there's a dependency on the Spirit of God to do what He's been sent to do, which is through the Word to reveal the person of Christ to you as a believer.

And as He's being revealed to you, The fake is immediately apparent. It's like if for five years I kept telling somebody at a long distance about how wonderful my wife was and they began to have an understanding of who she was and then they were trying to explain to somebody else who never met her what she was like and they totally missed it. Why? Because they never met her. spirit of God does is introduce you to the real thing, who's Christ himself.

That's the cool part of it. Exit Jesus. Exit Jesus. You use that, I've looked at it a million times but I can't remember what it... It just means that you go into the word of God to take out of it what's there. I see, okay. put anything in there. You don't go in there with a pre... You know the biggest disease in Christianity is? This is the number one disease. It's called the, I've made up my mind, don't confuse me with the facts disease.

And we're all guilty of that. So, so far we have been considering the divine authorship of the Bible. We've seen that it is God who has spoken. The Holy Spirit has inspired the book. that this was not merely to secure accuracy of detached parts, but for the purpose of unfolding a divine plan. That's the next point. From Genesis 1-1 to Revelation in the end, there's a plan in there that's being unfolded to us. That this inspiration is therefore express and minute, as well as general, in that it reaches down to every word, to the very words. What does it mean, the scripture can't be broken? Well that God is the author and that it's perfection. Okay, think about it. What does it mean that it can't be broken?

It means that you can't take any of it out and set it aside. We as dispensationalists make a real distinction between Israel and the church but that does not mean that we take Israel out of the Bible and throw it away. That's just as important as the church to understand. But it's equally greater to understand all of the grace that's in the church that has not been given to the nation of Israel.

So that you don't mix them. Reinhart says, How solemn for men, professed believers, to attempt to break, to mar a single line of the Holy Word. It would be wisdom, compared with this, to break a delicate and beautiful vase, under the plea that you recognize the beauty of the part of it to rent out the delicate shade and the rich fabric of its professing to admire all the rest, so you break a beautiful vase so you could admire one piece? No. It goes together.

Why are the most obscure incidentals in the word important? It shows that Christ was in God's mind from the beginning. Say that again? It shows that Christ was in the mind of God from the very beginning. Knowing the plan and the purpose, that's why what seems to be obscure is really important.

Randolph says, he says these might be called incidentals. In no way necessary for the general accuracy of scripture. you will find there is no such thing as incidentals in the word of God. Is that a true statement? No incidentals? You know some of the stuff in the Gospels that he talks about. I don't know, being on a lake, being in a boat, and that kind of incident is a story. How about the parables? Are they incident?

No. How all this accords with our theme, the literal inspiration by the Holy Spirit, He presided over it all, every word. He uttered the predictions in the Old Testament type in prophecy, He records their fulfillment in the New Testament. Accept this truth of the Spirit's inspiration and the Word of God becomes luminous. We see its priceless value even in the minutest details and we will handle it reverently. That's what you find.

One of the interesting things about the Word of God is that it is inexhaustibly true. You can read and study the same verse And then study it six months from now, six years from now, and there's something there every time. Every single time. There's no limit to the depth of the Word of God.

And sometimes it's this little incidental thing that opens up a whole new business for you. Okay. We've stopped at question 11. So we'll do 11, 12, and 13 next week. And then we'll start on Lesson 22, more on exploration but getting close to illumination. Okay, that's close.

Dear Father, how I thank you for you. How I thank you that you have purposely made it so that it's perfect. And that we can trust every sentence and every word. And the fact that you inspired men to write it, and you illuminate us to understand it. We thank you, we pray in your son's precious name. Amen.