As Much as You Want

God Part III – As Much As You Want

April 25, 2021

Pastor Eric Mann

This week we are in the middle of our series about the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity. The first couple of weeks we looked at the fact that the Holy Spirit is more than just some kind of “power” or “force” with no personality that helps us do hard things, He is a person just like the Father and the Son, and He loves us and wants us to have a relationship with Him. He wants us to be closely connected to Him so that He can work in our lives and through us to accomplish God’s purposes. He is more like a best friend and a personal guide and tutor to help us with the things of God.

Today we’re going to look at how being connected to the Holy Spirit affects our lives personally. Last week one of the passages we looked at regarding the work of the Holy Spirit was

Galatians 5:22–23 CSB

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.

The fruit of the Spirit are some of the Character traits that the Holy Spirit builds and develops in followers of Jesus. They are not the only things the Spirit does, but they are some of the things that God helps his people grow in.

In addition to the Fruit of the Spirit, there are Spiritual Disciplines - things like prayer, fasting, Bible study, worship, serving others, meditation, and more. There’s not a Bible passage that outlines these disciplines like the Fruit of the Spirit, but if you read the Bible you will see these disciplines and behaviors are encouraged and valued. As we continue our study of the Holy Spirit and how He relates to believers, let’s ask God to help us understand the Spirit’s role in molding and transforming us as individual followers of Christ.

Let’s Pray...

Over the years, I have developed a respect for various Christian leaders from around the world. Some of them are pastors, some are authors, some are speakers, and others are leaders in Christian organizations. I listen to their sermons, read their books, watch their videos, and they have helped me grow in my faith. Often, the people I admire seem to have more of God than I do, and when I see their relationship with God I want to have what they have. Here is where it becomes hard though. I wish I was a little more like them, but then I realize that in order to be as good of a speaker, to have the same kind of spiritual insights, or to have the deep relationship with God that they have, I have to live more like they live. I realize I have to put in the work to grow and mature that they have put in to get where they are.

Several years ago, I remember watching a news story on TV about a young girl, maybe nine or ten years old that had been playing basketball since she was a toddler. The news story showed her shooting baskets, dribbling two balls at a time and doing impressive dribbling and shooting drills. This girl had some amazing skills! As I was watching this, suddenly one of my daughters who was about the same age as the girl on TV pipes up, “I can do that!” At that moment I realized that the years of encouragement and building up our daughters’ confidence in their ability to do things and become who God wanted them to become had resulted in an unwanted effect. They were a little TOO confident. As this basketball phenom on TV continued to do amazing things with a ball, I tried to correct my daughter’s understanding of both her own abilities and of just how hard this girl on TV had worked in order to be able to do what she did. Developing skills and abilities, habits and character all takes effort and dedication. That’s true for sports, and it’s also true for the Fruit of the Spirit and for Spiritual disciplines.

I sometimes get a little bit scared when I start to desire to be as good of a teacher and speaker and leader as some of the people I admire. It scares me because those people didn’t become skilled and godly and good at what they do by just wishing they were better at it; they had to work hard at living a life that developed those abilities and character traits in their lives. I’m scared because I realize that if I want to become as good as they are in some of the areas that I admire them, it’s going to take a lot of work, and a lot of giving up some of the comforts I am accustomed to. It means I’m going to have to change some things in my life. Even though I have grown in many of these areas in my own life, I know that I still need to continue pursuing the kind of radical, selfless, completely surrendered life that these people live so that I can live my life confidently knowing that I am being the best that I can be for God within His plan for my life. The truth is that God wants each one of US who call ourselves followers of Jesus to live lives of complete surrender and radical obedience. That should be the norm, not the exception among Christians. God may never plan for you or me to write books that masses of people read or speak at conferences that inspire others to live for Christ, but I know He wants you and me to continue that struggle that happens inside of us where one part of us wants to be used by God in great ways and another part of us wants to coast and relax and not be challenged too much. Many of us experience that struggle between living the status quo or living a radical and fully-committed life for Christ. God challenges me, and He challenges you to engage in that struggle as well. This leads me to a truth that is hard to swallow:

1. Every believer is as full of the Holy Spirit as we actually want to be. Every Christian has as much of the Fruit of the Holy Spirit and Spiritual Disciplines as he or she desires to have.

Now, I know that there are times that we struggle with living the life God wants us to live. Sometimes the struggle is with sin, especially habitual sin or things that have become controlling issues in our lives and we wish we could be free from those. Sometimes it is a struggle to develop the good habits and character God wants us to develop. Getting control of those issues is not an easy thing to do, but I firmly believe that if we are willing to let the Holy Spirit truly take over that area of our lives, and we’re willing to put in the hard work that it requires, we can become free from habitual sin and develop the godly practices God wants us to over time. If we depend on the Holy Spirit and let Him change us, God doesn’t just get rid of the bad things in our lives, He develops the good things in our lives.

This is one of the great things about the truth that all believers have the Holy Spirit living in them. The Spirit gives us access to the same power that brought Jesus up from the dead so that we can experience freedom and transformation in our lives. Here is what Paul says in his letter to the Ephesian church:

Ephesians 1:19–20 NLT

19 I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power 20 that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms.

And in his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that they are no longer to live according to their sinful nature but according to God’s Spirit. He says...

Romans 8:11–14 NLT

11 The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you. 12 Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, you have no obligation to do what your sinful nature urges you to do. 13 For if you live by its dictates, you will die. But if through the power of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of your sinful nature, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.

Before I understood the power of the Holy Spirit living in me, I used to read about the great men and women of God in the Old Testament and when I got to the places where their failures were exposed, it brought me sadness and despair. If David, the king who was called “A man after God’s own heart,” could fall into adultery and murder, what hope was there for me? If Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, could give in to his sinful nature and end up allowing his wives to put up temples to their foreign gods, how would my feeble wisdom help me make better decisions? On and on, there are examples of people who despite their greatness, failed at some point or another.

But then I realized that none of them had the Holy Spirit living in them on a permanent basis. The did not have the power that raised Jesus from the dead to help them resist temptation, overcome evil, transform their lives, or any of the other things that the Holy Spirit does for believers.

Believers have an advantage that none of the great men and women of the Old Testament had: the presence of the Holy Spirit in us, and His power to help us live like God wants us to live.

People in the times before God sent the Holy Spirit didn’t have that amazing advantage, and people today who are not Christians don’t have that advantage either.

But even though believers have the Spirit of God in them, and have access to the power He wields, many of us don’t access that power, and we don’t put in the hard work that it takes to grow and change. It takes discipline and hard work. There is a difference between desiring something, but not being willing to do the work to get it, and desiring something and being willing to do what it takes to achieve the goal you want to achieve.

You can pay for expensive coaching, but you won’t benefit from it if you don’t put into practice the advice that the coach gives you. (Example of me taking golf lessons.)

In 1 Corinthians chapters 9 and 10 Paul talks about discipline and self-control.

1 Corinthians 9:24–27 NLT

24 Don’t you realize that in a race everyone runs, but only one person gets the prize? So run to win! 25 All athletes are disciplined in their training. They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize. 26 So I run with purpose in every step. I am not just shadowboxing. 27 I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified.

Paul then goes on to write about several examples from the Old Testament where God’s people were disqualified in one way or another because of their sin, and tells them...

1 Corinthians 10:12–13 NLT

12 If you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall. 13 The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure.

In other words, even though we have God’s Spirit in us, we also have to put in our own effort and make the right choices to avoid sin, and also to pursue righteousness and growth spiritually.

You can go to a marriage counselor and listen to what he or she has to say, but it’s up to you to actually put their advice into practice. You can go to a class on how to become an expert at something (using a computer, managing your time, etc.) but it doesn’t help if you don’t do anything with the information you get. You can hire someone to come organize your home or your office, but if after they leave you don’t continue using their system, you will be back where you started. I could go on and on with examples… If we recognize that this is true in the non-spiritual areas of our lives, why is it so hard for us to understand that this same truth applies to our faith and our spiritual lives?

We must choose to allow the Holy Spirit to change us, and we must do the work God asks us to do in order to grow.

Let me be clear, I’m not talking about working to earn our salvation. We can’t earn our salvation no matter how hard we work. However, the process of Sanctification, which is where God transforms us and makes us more and more like Jesus, does require us to partner with God and contribute through obedience and hard work.

This process of spiritual growth and developing the Fruit of the Spirit and other Spiritual Disciplines has different challenges and moments of decision that each of us has to choose what we will do. So, let’s look at some of the decisions we have to make as followers of Jesus when it comes to our Spiritual Growth.

Decisions we make about our spiritual growth:

We make conscious decisions about how much we want to give up or not give up.

The truth is that God wants us to give everything up to Him. He wants us to give Him full control of our lives. He wants our emotions, our dreams, our friendships and other relationships, our finances and possessions, our desires, our time… everything. Now, God realizes that this takes time and that it is a process for each believer to give more and more of himself of herself to Him.

Still, a true follower of Jesus engages in that process, and you can see growth over time as you give up more of your life to Jesus. God will bring things up for each of us where He helps us to grow in those areas and bring those things under His Lordship. It’s not always the same process or the same order for every person. In one person, God might be working on helping them trust Him with his career, while with another person He might be working on them handing over their relationships to Him. He might be working with one person about trusting Him with their finances, and with another person about submitting their emotions to Him.

There will be times when the area God is addressing in your life is harder than others. You might feel that if you really live the way God wants you to live that others will look at you as if you’re strange or crazy. The world views some of God’s standards and ways of doing things as old fashioned and backwards, and in many cases even other Christians who are letting the world influence their view of things might question some of the things you do. This can lead to a fear of being seen as too “extreme,” so you are tempted to choose to only go part way with God instead of doing what He is asking you to do fully. Sometimes you know what the right standard is, but to hold that standard would take a lot more work, so you are tempted to compromise; to settle for less than God’s standard. But if you give in to those temptations to compromise or to not engage in the process with God, it will slow down or stall your spiritual growth, and you won’t reach your full potential as a follower of Christ until you submit that area of life to Him.

Another decision we make about our spiritual growth has to do with how long you choose to engage in the process.

Pursuing holiness is not an instant thing, it is a process. We make decisions to keep pursuing a higher standard of holiness or stop with the progress we’ve achieved so far.

There are times when God has been working in our lives in a certain area, and we have seen significant growth in that area. After a while we start to get tired of the process and are ready to move on to something different. Maybe God has been working to help you in the area of developing the spiritual fruit of “Peace”. In the past year, you have improved how you respond to things that used to make you blow up in anger. You no longer yell or throw things or call people names, and you keep your cool even though people still try to push your buttons. You feel that you’ve made enough progress in developing the fruit of Peace in your life, but now you feel God wants you to work on it even more by actually forgiving others, and trying to be loving to them. You might be tempted to say, “Isn’t it enough that we don’t get into fights anymore? Do I really need to keep working on this?” The thing about spiritual growth is that once we’ve dealt with some of the big obvious sins in our lives, God often reveals other sins that are related and are part of the same issue. Maybe lack of love and forgiveness over time were what prompted your angry outbursts, and now that those have improved, it’s time to work on those deeper issues. You have to choose to continue working on becoming more and more like the person Jesus wants you to be. Don’t get me wrong… It’s great that you’ve made the progress you’ve made so far, now it’s time to take it to the next level and continue growing spiritually.

This leads me to a third decision we have to make. All of these changes and growth require a huge amount of energy or power to achieve, and we don’t have that ability in ourselves.

We cannot achieve God’s standard of righteousness on our own. We need the help of the Holy Spirit to get us past where we are now to where we need to be.

Like I mentioned before about the Old Testament men and women who did not have the power of the Holy Spirit in them, so they often did things and made decisions that were tragic and devastating to their lives. The fact that we have the Holy Spirit doesn’t guarantee that we won’t make mistakes in our lives, even big ones, but it does mean that if we submit our lives to God and rely on the Holy Spirit’s power to try to live the life God wants us to live, we can live a life free from those life-destroying mistakes that we see in the lives of so many Old Testament heroes. Not only that, but we can live a life that is full of peace.

Here is what Paul writes in his letter to the Romans...

Romans 8:5–6 GNB

5 Those who live as their human nature tells them to, have their minds controlled by what human nature wants. Those who live as the Spirit tells them to, have their minds controlled by what the Spirit wants. 6 To be controlled by human nature results in death; to be controlled by the Spirit results in life and peace.

I don’t know about you, but a life and peace sounds pretty appealing to me. I would much rather be controlled by the Spirit than by my human nature or sin nature. Living by the Spirit of God helps us to go from where we are now, to where we need to be in terms of God transforming us to be more and more like Jesus.

So it sounds like life and peace comes from allowing the Holy Spirit to exercise an increasing amount of control in our lives. Some people call this being filled with the Spirit, or getting more of the Spirit.

Four ways to allow the Spirit greater control in your life:

1. Give yourself to God.

Romans 12:1–2 NLT

1 And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. 2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Give yourself to God. Some translations say, “Present your bodies as living sacrifices.” God wants us to come to Him. Imagine a breadline during the Great Depression where people came with a cup and a basket. If you didn’t have a cup, you didn’t get milk (or whatever drink was being provided). If you don’t present yourself, you won’t get the fullness of the Spirit of God. So present your vessel.

When you give something as a sacrifice, what happens to that thing? It is put to death. That’s what sacrifices were in he Biblical times. We pur our own desires and our own motives on the altar to God and tell God, “I am here for you to do whatever you want to do with me. That’s the attitude that then allows God to do the work that happens in the second verse of that passage, God transforms us into a new person and changes the way we think. This first step is a step of the will, a surrendering of our will to God.

Secondly, we...

2. Ask God for the Holy Spirit.

Luke 11:9–13 NLT

9 “And so I tell you, keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 “You fathers—if your children ask for a fish, do you give them a snake instead? 12 Or if they ask for an egg, do you give them a scorpion? Of course not! 13 So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”

Some people have used this to claim we can ask God for anything we want, no matter what. The context of this verse, though, assumes that a person is following God and obedient to what God is asking them to do. Their hearths and their minds are in sync with God’s heart and mind. So in that case, when we ask and when we seek, we are asking and seeking in line with what God values and desires. This passage is also specifically talking about asking God for the Holy Spirit. God loves us, and He wants to fill us more and more with His Spirit. That’s what this passage is telling us as Christ’s followers.

Once we give ourselves to God, and receive and connect with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit will start speaking to our hearts. He will point out areas we need to grow in, areas we need to prune or cut out of our lives, and areas we need to continue to be faithful in. Sometimes the things the Holy Spirit asks us to do and change will be hard for us, but if we are going to connect more and more with God and grow in our faith, we need to take the third step. We need to...

3. Obey

Jesus makes it clear in His teaching to His disciples that true followers of His are people who obey what He has taught them. In Matthew 28 as part of the Great Commission, Jesus instructs His disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to OBEY all that He commanded us.

John 14:15 NLT

15 “If you love me, obey my commandments.

John 14:21 NLT

21 Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. And because they love me, my Father will love them. And I will love them and reveal myself to each of them.”

Luke 6:46 CSB

46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do the things I say?

In Acts, Luke writes that the Holy Spirit, which is given to all believers, is given to those who OBEY God, so obedience and true belief or faith clearly go hand in hand.

Acts 5:32 NLT

32 We are witnesses of these things and so is the Holy Spirit, who is given by God to those who obey him.”

Obedience is a key element of having more of God’s Spirit in us. The more we obey, the more God works in our lives, and the more the Holy Spirit speaks to us and leads us. On the other hand, if we refuse to obey, we are basically telling God, “I don’t want what you want for me.” How can we expect God to give us more of Himself if we refuse to follow Him? So obedience is a key sign or evidence of our relationship with Jesus.

The final part of getting more of the Spirit is to...

4. Believe

Spiritual growth is a constant process of expressing your faith in God. Many of the ways that God uses to make us grow require us to trust Him and His plans.

Galatians 3:2 NLT

2 Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ.

This verse seems to contradict the previous verse, but it does not. In the verse we saw before this one, obedience was a sign of a healthy relationship with Jesus. This verse talks about the faith that is the source of our salvation, which is also the reason that we receive the Holy Spirit. Because we believed and put our faith in Jesus, we have been saved, and because we are saved, we receive the Holy Spirit, so we have the Spirit based on that saving faith.

But, Christ’s message is more than just about salvation, it is also about transforming our lives. As we exercise our faith in God through obedience and as we trust God to transform us into who He wants us to be through the power of the Holy Spirit, we grow in our relationship with Him, and in our connection with Him.

Near the beginning of this sermon I made a statement that we are as full of the Holy Spirit as we want to be, and we only have as much of the Fruit of the Spirit as we want to have. The great thing about God’s love for us is that even when we have been slow to grow in our faith and in our relationship with God through the Holy Spirit, we can choose at any moment to engage in the process of asking God for more and more of His Spirit. God desires for each one of us to be fully committed and “all in” with Him. Understanding that it takes a process of working hard to develop that relationship is one of the first steps to attaining the life God wants us to have. We just need to give ourselves to God, ask Him for more of the Holy Spirit, respond in obedience when He speaks to us, and increase our faith that He will do what He promises to do. And through that process God develops not just the gifts of the Spirit in us, but also many other spiritual disciplines and character traits that are honoring to Him and helpful to us in our work for His kingdom.

Let’s pray...

Hebrews 13:20–21 CSB

20 Now may the God of peace, who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus—the great Shepherd of the sheep—through the blood of the everlasting covenant, 21 equip you with everything good to do his will, working in us what is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.