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God made man out of the dust of the ground, and man has been dust ever since, and we can’t quite shake it off.
He is a Person.
He is not matter, but He is substance.
But the Holy Spirit has will and intelligence and feeling and knowledge and sympathy and ability to love and see and think and hear and speak and desire the same as any person has.
Many of us have grown up on the theology that accepts the Holy Spirit as a Person, and even as a divine Person, but for some reason it never did us any good. We are as empty as ever, we are as joyless as ever, we are as far from peace as ever, we are as weak as ever.
if the Holy
Spirit is to be included here He has to be equal to the Father and the Son.
“Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.”
As soon as the word “eternal” is used about a being it immediately establishes the fact that he never had a beginning, is not a creature at all, but God.
It is the same with the fullness of the Holy Ghost. Evangelical Christianity believes it, but nobody experiences it. It lies under the snow, forgotten.
so that if you were to be suddenly transferred to heaven itself you wouldn’t be any closer to God than you are now, for God is already here. Changing your geographical location would not bring you any nearer to God nor God any nearer to you, because the indivisible Trinity is present,
you can know what the Spirit is like by knowing what Jesus is like.
He was busy creating expectation in them.
These disciples had reached an impasse.
When I hear that she has founded hospitals and insane asylums, I say surely she must be of God because that is what God would do, being what He is. When I hear that she has emancipated woman and has taken her from being a chattel slave and an object of some old king’s lust to being the equal of the man and queen in his home, I say surely that must be of God.
There is another kind of evidence. It is the immediate evidence of the inner life. That is the evidence by which you know you are alive. If I were to prove that you weren’t alive, you would chuckle and go home just as alive as you are now and not a bit worried about it, because you have the instant, unmediated evidence of internal life.
Jesus Christ wanted to take religion out of the external and make it internal and put it on the same level as life itself, so that a man knows he knows God the same as he knows he is himself and not somebody else. He knows he knows God the same as he knows he is alive and not dead. Only the Holy Ghost can do that. The Holy Spirit came to carry the evidence of Christianity from the books of apologetics into the human heart, and that is exactly what He does.
God took religion from the realm of the external and made it internal.
God looks at the heart.
I am taking Christian apologetics out of the realm of logic and putting it into the realm of life. I am proving My deity, and My proof will not be an appeal to a general or a prime minister. The proof lies in an invisible, unseen but powerful energy that visits the human soul when the gospel is preached—the Holy Ghost!”
The Spirit of the living God brought an evidence that needed no logic; it went straight to the soul like a flash of silver light, like the direct plunge of a sharp spear into the heart. Those are the very words that the Scriptures use when it says “pierced (pricked) to the heart.”
There is an immediate witness, an unmediated push of the Spirit of God upon the spirit of man.
Is the promise of the Father, with all its attendant riches of spiritual grace and power, intended to be for first-century Christians only?
No, Peter is dead, and I can’t be nourished by what Peter ate.
because it isn’t true; I can’t give you such a course.
No formula to being filled with the Holy Spirit
One of them is: Before you are filled with the Holy Spirit you must be sure that you can be filled.
You must, I say, be satisfied that this is nothing added or extra. The Spirit-filled life is not a special, deluxe edition of Christianity. It is part and parcel of the total plan of God for His people.
For all beliuvers,everywhere. Not just for some, not an add on, not an option
You must be satisfied, again, that there is nothing about the Holy Spirit queer or strange or eerie.
You don’t have to persuade God at all. There is no persuasion necessary. Dr. Simpson used to say, “Being filled with the Spirit is as easy as breathing; you can simply breathe out and breathe in.” He wrote a hymn to that effect. I am sorry that it is not a better hymn, because it is wonderful theology.
