Untitled Sermon (10)

Understanding the Spirit in Our Lives

Intro: Good evening everyone! We are going to be in 1st Corinthians 2:10-16. Last week in our 3 part series of talking about God we talked about specifically God the Son. This week is our last week talking about God and who he is. Specifically we will be talking about God the Holy Spirit tonight. This is something that I feel as though we don’t talk about often or enough. The Spirit is such an important part of Christianity and within the Trinity. There is no ranking between the different persons of the Trinity. They are all God. So tonight we are going to be talking about who the Holy Spirit is and how he affects us as Christians today.

1. Spirit Unveils Our Wisdom

Here starting out in verse 10 it says that God reveals things to us through the Spirit. What exactly has God revealed to us through the Spirit. The first thing that God revealed to you if you are in Christ is himself. Before we know who God is the bible tells us that we are blind. We are not able to see the things of God because of the Sin that is in our lives. Its as if we are tunnel visioned in on our sin and there is no way for us to get out of that thinking. This is so true and you know this if you have ever shared Christ with someone who doesn’t know the Lord. About once a week someone will come up to the church office and ask for help with their power or water bill or something like that. So we take that opportunity to share Jesus with them. And you can ask Austin this but when you talk to these people sometimes you just want to shake them because the words that you are saying. Its like what you are saying is going in one ear and going out the other. You can say that the scripture is true if you have ever been in that situation. These people are blind to their need for a savior and are blind to the effects of their sin. They are truly lost. So what does this have to do with the Spirit? Well at one point we were all blind. We all were like these people that I have described and some of you here tonight might be the same way. Salvation is from God. In some supernatural way the Spirit enters into your life through the preaching or teaching or evangelism of someone else. And in a moment God through the Spirit entering into your life reveals himself to you. And in that moment you are no longer blind but you can see. You can see who God is in all of is Holiness and who you are in all of your disobedience and you see that you deserve death and wrath. But then through the Spirit revealing God to you can then come to understand that God provided a savior for you through Jesus. All of this is done through the Holy Spirit entering into our lives and changing our hearts and revealing to us these things. Some people try to think there way to God sometimes. They think they can study enough of the Bible or they can study enough of Church History to know who God is. But guys this is impossible. You can not work your way to God. In order to truly know and understand who he is he must reveal himself to you through the Holy Spirit. Then in Verse 11 he gives us an example and he says that who can know what you are thinking in your brain besides yourself. This is the same thing with God who can know his thoughts except for the Spirit of God himself.

2. Spirit Inspires Our Insight

We pick up in verse 12 and it tells us that we have not recieved the spirit of the world as Christians. This is referring to what we were just talking about. As people we enter into this earth of having a spirit of the world. The spirit of what is called original sin. In Psalm 51 David says in sin my mother conceived me. When we are born into this earth we are born into sin because of the sins of Adam and Eve being passed down through generation to generation. But thank the Lord almighty that if we are people who are in Christ that spirit no longer lives inside of us but now we have a spirit who is from God and that is the Holy Spirit. The living Spirit of God lives inside of us. Now it doesn’t talk about this in these verses but I think it is essential to mention this as we go through these verses. The Body that we live in Called the flesh is still in us. The thing that is pulled to the things of the world still lives within us. It is constantly trying to pull us back into sin and self gratification. So you as a Christian are still going to struggle with sin. But we should constantly be battling it every single day of our lives. And we are only able to battle it because of the Holy Spirit living inside of us. At the end of verse 12 here it says that we might understand the things freely given to us by God. He’s given us the Holy Spirit so that we can take off the lenses of the world and be able to look at things from a different perspective for things that have been freely given to us. For example, God gave us the ability to speak and communicate through language. He gave us this so that we could talk to each other about him and even be evangelistic in our words and conversations. But because of the flesh mankind perverted this gift into us using our mouths and language to speak ill of others. We are Christians even still struggle with this. Our mouths speak gossip, division, and slander. This is because the spirit of the World perverted this gift. But now as Christians you can look at language through the Holy Spirit and understand that God gave us this gift to communicate for a reason and that is to bring Glory to him through our mouths. Now in verse 13 we see Paul tell us that we are not taught these things from Human wisdom. Like I said earlier some people in this world think that they can learn enough. They think they can listen to enough people and lectures. But without the Holy Spirit in our life we will never be able to make sense of what Salvation is. Or how we can live a life like Christ. These things are only made known to us through the Spirit of God and absolutely nothing else. The only way for us to understand Spiritual Truths is through the Spirit who gave us these Spiritual truths. Our Wisdom as Christians does come from Gods Word. But you must have the Spirit of God inside of you for these things to make sense. There is a man named Lee Strobel. He wrote a book called “The Case for Christ”. He was an Atheist and a Skeptic of the Christian Faith. He sought out to prove Christianity wrong. He had a lot of knowledge in his head. He was by the worlds terms a very smart man. But as he sought out to prove Christianity wrong the Spirit started to reveal himself to him. The truths of scripture and the historical evidence that points to Christ finally started to make sense to him. So as he set out to disprove God and the Bible. The Spirit of God revealed himself to him and he came to understand and know the truth of Gods Grace and his realness here among us today.

3. The Spirit Shapes Our Perspective

Now moving onto verse 14 we see here that Paul tells us that the person that is naturally born into this world like we have been talking about tonight doesn not accept the things of the Spirit of God. He says they don’t do this because they are folly to him which means that they don’t make sense to this person. And this person is not able to understand them because these things must be spiritually discerned. Guys when we are in this world and naturally born into. What the Bible tell us and calls sin are things that naturally we enjoy. But when we look at the bible we see that God sees these things as wrong and that these things are sinful. So this is why that the Natural Person does not accept the things of God because they enjoy the sin that they are in and they do not see it as a problem. Its impossible to convince someone to take a medicine when they don’t see their sickness in the first place. This is a big problem in places today. People don’t call others to radical holiness through the Spirit of God. Some people look at the person who doesn’t know God and they tell them that they can keep their sin and they don’t have to change because Jesus loves them and he wouldn’t give them the desire to do these things. And you know what I have to say to that and what the Bible has to say to that. Your right God doesn’t give man sinful desires but instead through Adam man was already born into these sinful desires. God loves people but he hates sin. God through the Spirit calls us out of that sin and into holiness with God. The Spirit shapes and Changes our Perspective on our lives here on earth. In verse 15 Paul tells us that as Christians we are called to look different than the others in the world without Christ. As Christians our lives should look so much different than the world that they shouldn’t be able to understand or they should question why we live the way that we do. God through the Spirit has given us the ability to discern and understand certain things in this life. This may look like when you make a decision to not go to a party or to someones house because you know that they will be doing things that are not honoring to the Lord. To the World this looks like foolishness so as a Christian expect to be ridiculed for these things in your life. The world is not worthy to judge you because they do not understand because they do not have the spirit of God living inside of them. This verse also shouldn't cause us to be arrogant as a Christian because we are not above being corrected. Correction and accountability from Christian brothers and sisters is essential to our faith. Instead of arrogance this verse should cause us to be thankful for what God has brought us from and honor him through that thankfulness. Then here in verse 16 we see Paul say that who can understand the mind of the Lord to instruct him. This is meaning that our God is all knowing and his ways are so much higher than our ways and we has humans can’t even understand these things. Then here at the end he says as Christians we have the mind of Christ. Because of the Holy Spirit living inside of us we can now understand Gods will for our live and the point of us glorifying him forever. That is what he has called us to do through Christ. Tonight we talked about the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the World. So this brings the question. Which one is living inside of you and dominating your life?

When the Holy Spirit lives inside of you. You aren’t going to be perfect. You are still going to sin. But to know that the Holy Spirit lives inside of you there are a few things we can look at. The first thing we need to look at is internal struggle. When the Spirit lives inside of you there should be an internal struggle in your mind and your heart with sin. If you freely sin without license and enjoy that sin then the Holy Spirit does not live in you. But when you sin with the Holy Spirit living inside of you there should be an internal struggle between that and your flesh and sometimes your flesh gives into that sin. But after you commit that sin there should be a sense of knowing what you have done is wrong and running to the Lord for forgiveness and repentance. Another way to know if the Spirit lives inside of you or not is to just simply look at your life. Do you know the Gospel? If the Holy Spirit lives inside of you then you have come to understand the Grace of God and what he has done in your life. If not then here this right here. When God created this world he created Adam and Eve and sin was not a thing in this world and we lived in perfect harmony with God and he gave them the ability to make decisions for themselves. But then they were tempted by Satan to go against the one rule God gave them. They gave into that temptation and sinned. And because of that sin all of mankind became enslaved to that sin and it became all that we know. God then gave us commands to follow and because of our sin we break them everyday. And because of that sin we deserve to be punished by God for going against him. But God is a gracious God and he sent his one and only son down to this earth to live the perfect life free from sin. He then went on the cross and took upon the punishment for our sins that we commit when he didn’t do them himself. And because he took upon the wrath of God for us and defeated our sin by rising from the dead we can now have peace with God. The only way to have peace with God is through the belief in Christs and his work and the repentance of your sin. To turn away from that. I pray right that the Holy Spirit is revealing this story to you and opening your eyes to your sin. So please if you feel and sort of conviction of your sin or anything like that please come talk to me tonight and we can talk about what it looks like to live for Christ and to have the Holy Spirit in your life and the Lord changing your life. Lets pray