TRUE SPIRITUALITY

Sermon preached by Pastor P. M. Rowell at Forest Fold Chapel on Thursday evening 6th February 2003

Quench not the Spirit. 1 Thessalonians 5 vl9

When I think of the Holy Spirit and His work, especially in connection with a believer’s relationship with the Holy Spirit, there are four verses which so often come back to my mind and I want to put those four verses together for our meditation.

1. Grieve not the Spirit

You will find the first of these in Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 30 Now there are many verses I could have read to you, speaking of the Holy Spirit, but this is a verse, and the other verses will be similar, that has to do with the believer’s relationship with the Holy Spirit. Every believer is totally dependent upon the person and work of the Holy Spirit, just as they are on the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ True believers are people who are living a spiritual life and they are being warned about one of the dangers in spiritual life, and it is sad that it should ever have to be said, ‘and grieve not the Holy Spirit of God whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption’.

It is sad because we really are totally dependent upon the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives; I am sure that will become increasingly apparent when I look at further verses and so it should make us very concerned about the whole of this chapter. The verse I have just read to you is one of warning and exhortation, especially about the way we live Our relationship with the Holy Spirit is going to be profoundly affected by the way we live. Are we living as truly converted people? Are we living as people who have turned their back upon the world and its sir and its ways? Are we people who are living as disciples of Jesus Christ’ Look at verse 25 ‘putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour, for we are members one of another’. Is that the pattern of our lives?

Many are the warnings and exhortations surrounding this verse and that tells us there are certain things which, if we allow them into our lives, will indeed grieve the Holy Spirit of God. When that happens the Holy Spirit’s influence will be lessened, and so there will be less evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. What are these things then which would cause grief to the One who is the Holy Spirit of God’ Well, clearly anything that is opposed or contrary to His character as the Holy Spirit.

Let me just underline the fact that we do believe in three Persons in the Trinity, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are three divine persons, and the Holy Spirit is revealed to us in Scripture as
having certain characteristics. It is not that the Holy Spirit is a kind of vague feeling of God around us, it is far more personal than that. The Holy Spirit is shown to us in Scripture as a Person who has work to do and who has a character to sustain.
What then are the things that are going to grieve the Holy Spirit of God? Well, obviously it is anything that is contrary to God Himself because the Holy Spirit is God, the third Person of the Trinity; these Divine Persons are co-equal, as the old theologians used to put it, and co-eternal. The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, and these three are One. Not three Gods but one God, yet three Persons, so anything that is anti-God or anti-Christ is going to grieve the Holy Spirit of God. That is very evident from His name in this verse, 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 of God. 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 for instance, we are not to use God’s name as a curse or a blasphemy, we are not to be casual or careless about our speaking regarding God or the Lord Jesus Christ. Such things are grieving to the Spirit of God.

He is also the Spirit of truth, so anything which is contrary to truth revealed in the Scriptures, is going to grieve the Holy Spirit. We are not to allow into our lives those errors and heresies which are contrary to the word of truth because He is the Spirit of truth and 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, any rebellion against the words of command in the Scripture, these things grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

Anything contrary to the spirit of love will have the same sad consequences, for the Holy Spirit is the exclusive source of our spiritual affection. The Holy Spirit is the One who enables us to live in harmony and peace and love with the brethren. Go back to the earlier part of chapter 4 here in this epistle to the Ephesians, verse 2. ‘With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit’ and it will surely grieve the Spirit if there are those things allowed in our lives, in our relationships, of division and strife, and bitterness and impatience; no, that will grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

Pre-eminently, anything that is contrary to the spirit of love to God and love to our Lord Jesus Christ will deeply grieve the Holy Spirit of God.
Then in the last phrase of the text, just to re-emphasise the importance of not grieving the Holy Spirit of God, Paul goes on to say, ‘Whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption’, that is to say, through Him,
through His gracious work in our lives, there is the mark of a seal upon us. A seal in those days was a sign of possession, it was a sign of security, and the Holy Spirit is like that. God in His grace, and the Lord Jesus in His mercy, have given to us the Holy Spirit to abide with us forever. The Holy Spirit marks us out and there is a kind of confirmation emphasising the relationship between our souls and the living God by the presence of the Holy Spirit. This seal is for our reassurance, telling us we are redeemed; and we are waiting for the final day when we shall be redeemed from this evil world and taken into glory to be freed from sin eternally.

You see how dependent we are and how important it is that we possess every evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives; we must not grieve Holy Spirit of God!

2. Quench not the Spirit
Consider now a second verse, and that is in the 1st Epistle to the Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 19, ‘Quench not the Spirit’. If you take those two words together, ‘grieve’ and then ‘quench’, I think that you will sense that there is a sort of deepening, strengthening feeling about the word ‘quench’. There is something awfully threatening about that, it is like putting something out, blowing a flame out, pouring water on a fire, ‘Quench not the Spirit’. 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 We not only just grow cold, less spiritually lively and warm, but we have quenched the Spirit. I will not say that He has finally forsaken us because that is not true of God’s children, it cannot be true; but He has turned His back on us and left us for a while to go on in our own way. We have been behaving as though we can do without Him. It is almost as though He says, ‘Very well then, see how you get on without Me.’

That is quenching the Spirit, doing something which would cause the Holy Spirit to be both grieved and then to act, anything which causes the Spirit’s influence to cease in our lives. Now that is a spiritual disaster. If we have not been warned by the word ‘grieve’, we shall be painfully warned by the word ‘quench’, ‘Quench not the Spirit.’ What are the particular things that would quench the Spirit? Well, to persist in any of the other things which I mentioned under the first heading. If we wilfully and sinfully persist, 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 the quenching of the Spirit.

This is particularly true in regard to anything that directly opposes or questions the Holy Spirit Himself. Now I almost hesitate to turn to these verses, but I feel I must, and you will find them in Matthew chapter 12
vv31 and 32. Our Lord says, ‘Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy
against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men, And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come’. That has often been referred to as the unforgivable sin! It is an awesome and dreadful thing to contemplate. It is an amazing thing that Jesus said, ‘Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man it shall be forgiven him,’ the inference of course being that there is someone who has done that, but has sought forgiveness and has repented of the sin, and has been forgiven. But there is something so utterly awful about the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, because the Lord says, that shall not be forgiven unto men. So this word, ‘quench’, is a word which seems to me to bring us to the edge of a precipice. ‘Quench not’, because if you do, and you go on like that, the next step is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which is turning against the very Person whom you say you depend upon for every aspect of spiritual life.

So there is something very urgent about this warning, ‘Quench not the Spirit’. I believe if we persist in wilfully going contrary to the word of God, to the teaching of the Spirit of God, to the teaching of the Spirit of truth, love, and unity, and especially contrary to the particular name of the Spirit as the Holy Spirit, if we persist in a life of unholiness we are in grave danger of quenching the Spirit, and that is but a step, as it were from the edge of the precipice. Because we cannot survive spiritually on our own, ‘Quench not the Spirit’.

One of the things that Satan is always trying to do is inject some evil into our lives and encourage us to belittle it, to try almost to justify ourselves, to excuse ourselves, so that we can deaden our conscience and go on in the way that we know (at least initially 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, that they have quenched the Spirit, they have sorely and sadly backslidden and the way of return is very, very hard and painful. The way of transgressors, the Scripture says, is hard.

3. Be filled with the Spirit

Well, there are the negatives, grieve not, quench not the Spirit, now let us think about some positives. This is another verse which so often comes back into my mind in Ephesians chapter 5 and the latter part of verse 18. The whole verse reads, ‘And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit.

As we have already seen, if we grieve the Holy Spirit, we are in danger of quenching the Holy Spirit. The consequence of this will be that there are certain things that we will find it an awful drag to do, if you understand what I mean. We shall be dragging ourselves to prayer, we shall be dragging ourselves to services of worship, we shall be
dragging ourselves to read the Bible; there will be a dark, cold deathliness about our spiritual lives and we shall hardly be able to call them spiritual lives. We certainly shall not be speaking to ourselves or to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in our hearts to the Lord, shall we? We shall not be feeling like that at all. We shall be finding that singing hymns is a miserable business. There is something that you feel is wrong. How can I sing songs of praise if I am not praising God? How can I sing hymns of prayer if I am not praying to God? Oh, says Paul, ‘Be filled with the Spirit’, and certainly, in the contrast in verse 18 we shall not be filled with the Spirit if we are filled with wine, and drunk through wine, shall we? The drunkard is never filled with the Spirit of God though he may be filled with a lot of other sorts of spirits, but certainly not the Spirit of God.

Have you ever prayed to be filled with the Spirit? Do you really plead with the Lord frequently to fill you with His Spirit? Well, you especially need to do that if you have grieved the Spirit and you most specially need to do that if you are near to quenching the Spirit, pleading to the Lord to be merciful to you and to fill you with His Spirit. Surely it is right to seek a fuller measure of the Spirit’s influence in our lives. If you have begun to sense the pain of having grieved the Spirit or even if you have got to the point of almost quenching the Spirit, surely all real Biblical reason points 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’. The very word fill indicates that we can be more or less full of the Holy Spirit, we need to be filled up, as it were with the Holy Spirit.

We need to have our whole life influenced by the Holy Spirit. What do you allow in your life? Maybe today for instance you have given way to angry words; I do not know if you have, but you may have. Maybe you have been very impatient and have given away to angry words and so you felt, as you came along to the service, too embarrassed to turn back and go home, but not at all inclined to come here because of what you have been. You have a feeling of hypocrisy about it and the devil will say to you, ‘Don’t you go there praying to be filled with the Spirit. How can you hope to be filled with the Spirit after the way you have been behaving’. The devil will go on like that, urging you not to 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 Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, the greater defeat for the devil and the stronger we will be in resisting him.

‘Be filled’, there is an urgency about these words, ‘be filled with the Spirit’. Your past life, your unconverted life, has been filled with so many other things. You will remember how you urgently went after this
sin, or that, or the other. But the message of Paul here is that you have a new life to live, a new direction in your life. You are to be filled with the Spirit. You are to see that your life is filled with those things which are truly of the Spirit of God and so you pray through the temptation and, in spite of the evil suggestion of the wicked one, you say, ‘Lord, sinful and unworthy as I am, I do want to be filled with the Spirit, I do want to be forgiven, I do want to know a closer walk with God, I really do want to be filled with the Spirit’. So do not be put off, do not be tempted to cease praying, but urgently pray that you might be filled with the Spirit, and then you will find a fresh joy in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. Your singing will be so different.

I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this or not, a striking experience many years ago in my early days of preaching. I went to a chapel to preach, and it had been quite an unremarkable service. I can’t remember what my text was but in the last hymn something very striking happened. The earlier hymns had been sung in the usual way. There was nothing to cause me to remember the earlier hymns, they were just part of the service, the service was passing and we got to the last hymn, and suddenly in that last hymn it was as though many of the hearts of the people in that building were doing exactly what this verse says, they were rejoicing in the Lord, singing and making melody in their hearts to the Lord. That very evidently showed itself by the way the hymn was sung.

Sometimes when I hear the singing here and try to join in with it I feel that it seems to be dragging. There doesn’t seem to be much effort and energy and liveliness in the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. But at other times we are singing and making melody in our hearts to the Lord. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it? To be filled with the Spirit is essential if we are to make melody in our hearts to the Lord. What a joy and spiritual blessing it is to sing then!

4. To be spiritually minded.

The fourth reference I want to give you this evening is in Romans, chapter 8, a wonderful chapter on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Now there is a contrast that you are going to be seeing in these following verses. On the one hand there is the life after the flesh which typifies the carnal and ungodly person, on the other hand the life after the Spirit which typifies the pattern of life that is called spiritual and is under the influence of the Holy Spirit. I will read the first eight verses of this amazing chapter;

‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through
the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God’.

So, as we read in verse five, what are you really minding? What do you really mind about, or what do you really care about? What are you really concerned about? It is that kind of word. What is it that is occupying our mind, our attention, our concern, our ambition, and our desires’?

Well, says Paul, ‘They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh’, that is a sinful fleshly way of living. ‘But they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit’. Is that the new direction of our lives? Do we want the things of the Spirit? Are our minds concerned about the things of the Spirit? They are the things we want to know about and think about, they are the things that concern us now. Yes, we have our everyday lives to live. We have our responsibilities in this world. These verses are not saying anything against that. Indeed, if we are spiritually minded we shall be very careful about the way we are living in the everyday things in our lives. We are to be diligent in business, we have to give our mind and attention to legitimate things in this life, but there is an over-arching pattern in a true Christian life – the things of the Spirit. If we are grieving or quenching the Spirit the things of the Spirit are going to be secondary. We shall not be seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, we shall be seeking all these other things as being the principal things in our lives.
Paul was very concerned about this as he says, ‘they that are after the Spirit mind the things of the Spirit’, not the things of the flesh, but this
verse 6 is the one I wanted to underline here.

‘For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace’. And if we grieve the Spirit, if we are moving toward;
quenching the Spirit, then there is a deathliness creeps over our spiritua lives. Yes, by the amazing patience and grace of God not one of Hi1 children will ever die in the eternal judgmental sense of dying, but they will certainly experience something of awful deathliness in theil Christian lives and that is very, very sad. It is to be moving in quite the wrong direction, to be minding and becoming obsessed with the thing’ that are carnal. But to be spiritually minded is to be minding the thing* of the Spirit.

We do use the word, ‘minding’, in the sense you mothers would perhaps use it. You have a friend who might call just when you are
desperate to do some shopping. You might say, ‘Can you mind the child while I go shopping?’ You then quite rightly expect them to pay attention to the child and care for the child and put their mind to the issue. In the same way the believer is to give their mind to the things that are spiritual, carefully and deliberately.

To be spiritually minded is life. There is a liveliness when you are filled with the Spirit. There is a liveliness in your singing and the reading of the Scriptures and in your interaction with others. There is a greater clarity in your Christian testimony when you are spiritually minded. You experience a liveliness and a warmth and you enjoy a new sense of reality in spiritual things. The truly important things are most important things 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 when 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 at work in our lives, we shall have that deepened sense of relationship with the Lord, reconciliation, peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And so Paul goes on in these verses to say, ‘Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, (that is you are not carnally minded, you are not dead in trespasses and in sin), but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness’.

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 you if you ever prayed or prayed frequently to be filled with the Spirit. Do you also 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 spiritual 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.

That will make a wonderful difference to your own personal spiritual lives; it will make a wonderful difference to your church life and to your relationship with other believers. You may be finding relationship with other believers at present particularly difficult, I don’t know, I have no secret knowledge at all and I am not saying this to ‘fit caps on’ as they used to say. It is not that at all. It may be that we need to be specially 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 is such a difficult person to get on with. Do make me spiritually minded, keep me humble, keep me resilient 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’. To be spiritually minded is life and peace.

So grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, quench not the Spirit, be filled with the Spirit and be spiritually minded because that is life and peace Amen.