The Holy Spirit Lives In Us

Many years ago there was a farmer named Yates. He lived in West Texas during the Depression. Things were not going well for Farmer Yates. His land bore the scars of the terrible drought that had turned West Texas into a Dust Bowl. In fact, things were so bad that Farmer Yates and his family had to go on government relief.

But then one day a man knocked on the faded front door of the Yates’s farmhouse. He introduced himself as a geologist from an oil exploration company. He asked Farmer Yates for permission to drill a test well on his property, as they thought there might be a chance that there was some oil beneath the ground. Farmer Yates gave his permission and they drilled the well.

It came in a gusher. They drilled another well. It came in a gusher. And another and another. In fact, the oil company found that Farmer Yates’ was sitting on top of the largest deposit of oil ever discovered in the world up to that time. In fact, the geologists gave it a name; they called it the Yates’ Pool.

Think of it. While Farmer Yates and his family were on government relief, they were actually sitting on top of millions of dollars worth of oil. They were fabulously rich, but they didn’t even know it.

Unfortunately, that’s the way it is for most Christians. Spiritually speaking, they are incredibly wealthy, but they don’t even know it. They have an incredible spiritual resource within them, but they don’t make use of it. So they struggle along in a frustrating and fruitless existence, wondering if this is what the abundant life is all about.

The resource I’m talking about, of course, is the Holy Spirit. Did you know that the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Christian is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the whole Bible?

A.W. Tozer said “Satan has opposed the doctrine of the Spirit-filled life about as bitterly as any other doctrine there is. He has confused it, opposed it, surrounded it with false notions and fears. He has blocked every effort of the Church of Christ to receive from the Father her divine and blood-bought patrimony.”

The result is that Christians have gone to one of two extremes - they have either ignored the Holy Spirit entirely, thinking that the Spirit-filled life is a special, deluxe edition of Christianity only for super-saints. Or, they’ve gotten themselves so tied up in knots over the Holy Spirit that they’ve fixated upon him, and forgotten that the whole reason he came was to get them to follow Jesus Christ. Either way, they’re not benefitting from the incredible riches that God gave us when he gave us His Holy Spirit.

Today, I’d like to show you from Scripture some vitally important truths about your relationship with the Holy Spirit, and what a difference he wants to make in your life. We’re going to cover a lot of ground, so have your Bibles ready. This message is going to be a little bit more “teachy” than some. We won’t have time for many illustrations and anecdotes because there’s so much material to cover. So maybe you should grab a pencil and paper and take notes so you can review some of these truths later.

The first thing that we need to know about the Holy Spirit is that he indwells every Christian. When a person turns away from his sin and places his trust in Jesus Christ, several things happen to him. He is born again. He goes from being spiritually dead to being spiritually alive. He is justified. He goes from being guilty in the eyes of God to being innocent. He is adopted into God’s family. He goes from being a slave to being a full-fledged son of God, with all the rights and privileges of sonship.

And the Holy Spirit comes into his life and takes up residence. How do we know this? The Bible says so. Turn to John 7:37-39.

John 7:37-39 On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.

John 14:16-17 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

John 16:7 But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.

Now we know that after Jesus ascended into heaven, this is precisely what happened. In fact, shortly before his departure, in Acts 1, Jesus gave his disciples some final instructions…

Acts 1:4-5 “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

On the day of Pentecost, that’s exactly what happened.

Acts 2:1 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now some people might say, “Well, that was nice for them, but they lived back in the first century. What about us? How do we know that the Holy Spirit still comes into our lives today?” Good question. Turn to…

Romans 5:5 And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

Paul was writing this at least thirty years after the Day of Pentecost. And he was writing it to believers who lived in Rome, over 1,000 miles away from Jerusalem. They were not there at Pentecost. And furthermore, he told them in…

Romans 8:9 if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.

That seems to be pretty clear, doesn’t it? If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit living in you. He’s God’s mark of ownership on your life.

Jude, who incidentally was the half-brother of Jesus, wrote about false teachers who would scoff at the truth and bring division to the church. He said…

Jude 1:19 These are the men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.

If you don’t have the Holy Spirit, it indicates that you’re not a Christian.

Now you may be saying “OK. I can see that. The Bible says that if I am a follower of Jesus Christ, I must have the Holy Spirit living in me. But how come I can’t feel him?

Perhaps you saw a TV preacher say that when the Holy Spirit comes into you, you’ll speak in tongues and you’ll be slain in the Spirit, and all kinds of wild things will happen to you.

But when you received Jesus Christ and became a Christian, none of that stuff happened. There were no lightning flashes, no angel choirs singing. No tongues of flame over your head. As a matter of fact, you didn’t really feel anything. So does that mean that something’s wrong with you?

No, not at all. You have to understand that we live in a day when feelings and experience have come to mean everything. People nowadays make their feelings the authority on which they base their lives. They’re not interested in objective truth; they’re interested in whatever makes them feel good.

Many Christians have gotten caught up in this. They think, when it comes to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that if you can’t feel it, it can’t be happening. So they look for the excitement; they look for the sensation; they look for the feelings as confirmation of spiritual truth.

But you’ll find, if you study the Bible seriously, that most aspects of the Christian life are not based on feelings, or experience, or sensation. They’re based on faith.

The Bible says that the Holy Spirit indwells everyone who believes in Jesus Christ. That’s a fact. It isn’t dependent on whether you can feel him or not.

But you may be saying “What about the gift of tongues? The BIble says that when the Holy Spirit came upon those believers in the book of Acts, they spoke in tongues. That was pretty sensational, wasn’t it?”

Yes, as a matter of fact, it was. Those people did speak in tongues, and that was an amazing miracle. But did you know that that only happened three times in the book of Acts - in chapter 2, 10, and 19? And each time it happened for a specific reason. But we don’t have time to get into that today. (Some Sunday night in the New Year, we’ll have a teaching session on tongues and their purpose in the New Testament.)

There are a lot more instances in the Bible of people becoming Christians and having the Holy Spirit come upon them and nothing dramatic happens at all. People like Lydia, and Barnabas, and the Ethiopian eunuch, the Philippian jailer. People in Antioch and Thessalonica, Iconium and Athens - people who became Christians without speaking in tongues, without being slain in the Spirit (whatever that means!).

So be careful of this teaching that says that you’ve got to speak in tongues or have some amazing experience as proof that the Holy Spirit has come into your life. If you have received Jesus Christ as your Savior, the Holy Spirit came into your life the moment that you were saved.

And he does a couple of other things, too, at the moment of salvation. The Bible says that he baptizes you into the Body of Christ. Turn to 1 Corinthians 12. Paul is talking to the church at Corinth. Now the church at Corinth had a problem. There were divisions among them. Some of them said “I am of Paul.” Some of them said “I am of Apollos.” Still others said “I am of Christ.”

And they were fighting about spiritual gifts. Some of them were saying that you needed to have certain spiritual gifts, like the gift of tongues, to prove that you were really spiritual. They were over-emphasizing certain gifts, and under-emphasizing others. So the result was that you had a church divided against itself.

Now when Paul addressed that problem, he reminded the Corinthians that they were all part of one body - the Body of Christ. The individual parts of a physical body are not divided against each other. If they are, you’ve got cancer. But Paul says “We are all of one body.” How did we get that way? The Holy Spirit did it the moment we trusted Christ. He placed us into the Body.

1 Corinthians 12:12-13 The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

Some people hear that word “baptism” and they get all kinds of strange notions in their heads. The word “baptize” simply means to “place into”. When the Bible talks about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, it simply means that the Holy Spirit places you into the Body of Christ the moment you become a Christian. That happens when you are saved, and not afterward. It isn’t something you need to seek, or pray for, or wait for. It happens once to every believer, and it happens when you become a Christian.

Ephesians 4:4-5 There is one body and one Spirit— just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism;

Now the Holy Spirit does something else the moment that you become a Christian. He seals you.

When you go into a drugstore and pick up a bottle of Tylenol, you’ll find that there is a protective seal around the lid. Why is it there? Well, if you’ll remember, a few years ago, it didn’t used to be there. But then some crackpot decided to put cyanide in with the Tylenol, and a couple of people were actually poisoned.

So now the company that makes Tylenol puts a protective seal on each and every bottle of Tylenol. That seal is put on at the factory where the bottle is filled, and it is only taken off when you get home and you want to use it. That seal tells you that no one else has opened the bottle. Nobody else has tampered with it. The contents of that bottle are secure because the seal is on the lid.

God puts a seal on each and every person who comes to Christ. The seal is the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 1:13 And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit,

Ephesians 4:30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

2 Corinthians 1:21 Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

The Holy Spirit seals us in order to keep us safe and secure until the day of redemption. Nobody can tamper with us. Nobody can damage our status as blood-bought people who are on their way to heaven.

Some churches teach that you can lose your salvation. But that would mean that somebody would have to remove the seal of protection and mark of ownership that God placed on our lives. And that just can’t happen, because nobody is more powerful than God.

Ephesians 1:14 (The Holy Spirit) is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.

So the Holy Spirit indwells us, he baptizes us into the Body of Christ, and he seals us. All those things happen the moment we become a Christian.

But there’s one more vital issue that I want to talk to you about today. It is the filling of the Holy Spirit. Turn to Eph. 5:18

Ephesians 5:18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.

There are three things that I want you to notice about this verse.

1. contrast

2. command

3. continuity

1. contrast

What is the contrast in this verse? It’s the contrast between being drunk on wine and being filled with the Spirit. Paul says “Don’t get drunk… instead, be filled.” Wow! That’s some contrast! What’s he getting at here?

Well, if you’ve ever been drunk, you’ll probably know. Have you ever heard someone talk about their drinking exploits? You know, they’ll say stuff like “Man, I was so smashed on the weekend, I didn’t even know what I was doing.” And they’ll tell hilarious and sometimes embarrassing stories about stuff they never would have done had they been in their right minds.

When a person is under the influence of alcohol, he becomes capable of doing things that he wouldn’t normally do. The drug makes him different from the way he normally is, but usually in a destructive and negative way. Some people when they are drunk become really mean and nasty. Others just get silly and make utter fools of themselves. Either way, they are different, because the alcohol is controlling them.

Now in the same way, when a person is filled with the Spirit, he is going to act differently because the Holy Spirit is controlling him. He’s not going to act the way that he normally would. But the effect is not going to be negative, like when he’s filled with alcohol. It’s going to be positive, because he’s filled with the Spirit.

Being filled with the Holy Spirit simply means to be controlled by the Holy Spirit. It means that you allow the Holy Spirit, who is already in your life as we have seen, to fill every part of your life. Every aspect of your life comes under his control. Your mind, your will, your emotions. You yield yourself to his influence.

Now does that turn you into some kind of religious freak? Do you go around with a goofy expression on your face saying “Praise the Lord!” every ten seconds? No. the Bible actually gives you a list of some of the changes that the Holy Spirit is going to make when you are filled with the Spirit. The list is found in…

Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

I don’t know anyone who can’t use more of those characteristics. When your wife comes home and tells you that your car got hit by a telephone pole, you need patience. When your teenager is being defiant, rebellious, and rude, you need love. When your boss reams you out for something you didn’t even do, you need self-control. When your doctor tells you that there’s a mysterious shadow on your X-ray, you need peace.

These are things that don’t come normally to us. But when we allow the Holy Spirit to fill our lives, these are the fruits he produces.

2. command

Getting back to Eph.5:18, that verse is in the form of a command. The verb “be filled” is in the imperative. It’s not a suggestion, it’s a command. That means that it is something that God wants us to do; that he expects all of us to do. Why?

Well, for the simple reason that the Christian life is impossible to live properly unless you do it. You see, when you became a Christian, God didn’t just save you and then say “OK, see you when you get to heaven.” Being a Christian means being a person in whom God wants to reproduce his character. He wants to change you in such a way as that you will actually become more like Jesus Christ. So every Christian is a construction site. God is at work constructing the character of Christ in you.

Now in order for that to happen, you’ve got to be under his control, not your own. There is no way that you or I can live up to Christ’s character under our own power. We simply can’t do it. That’s why we’ve got to allow the Holy Spirit to fill our lives. Because it’s only under his influence that we’ll begin to become more like Jesus Christ.

So God makes this a command “Be filled with the Spirit.” It’s the most important command of the whole Christian life. Because it is the key to living the Christian life.

3. continuity

There’s a continuity in that command that doesn’t come out very well in our English translation. The tense of that imperative verb “be filled” in Greek is the present tense, which indicates continuous action. It literally means “keep on being filled”.

If the filling of the Holy Spirit were just a once-for-all thing, that imperative would have been in the Greek aorist tense, which indicates point action. But it’s in the present tense - continuous action.

Every morning that we wake up, we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. We need his power filling us and controlling us and giving us the resources that we need to live that day the way that Jesus Christ would live it.

How can you make sure that you’re filled with the Holy Spirit each day? By doing what it says to do in Romans 12:1-2

Romans 12:1-2 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

There is no secret formula for being filled with the Spirit. You must simply present yourself to God. Ask him to fill you and control you each day. Then get busy and obey the Scriptures. That’s what’s known as walking in the Spirit.

If there’s any key to being filled with the Holy Spirit, it is obedience. You see, the Word of God is the tool that the Holy Spirit wants to use to construct the character of Christ in us. As we obey the Word of God, we will be putting ourselves exactly where the Holy Spirit wants us. We will be putting ourselves on his workbench.

And it goes without saying that the Holy Spirit will never lead you to do something that is contrary to the commands of Scripture. If you think the Holy Spirit is leading you to do something that the Bible says is wrong, you can be sure that it isn’t the Holy Spirit that’s leading you.

The Holy Spirit indwells each one of us; he seals us; and he baptizes us into the Body of Christ. And he wants to fill us. Spirit-filled Christianity isn’t some special, deluxe version of the faith. It’s the only Christianity there is.