TEEN TREE 
OF LIFE
The Gift of The Holy Spirit
Part 4
September 5, 2021
Before you begin, ask yourself a very important question: Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on The Cross for all of your sins? If you answered yes, you will need to be sure that you are filled with The Holy Spirit. How do you do this? You name your sins to God The Father in His Son’s Name. This is called Rebound. As a Christian, you must rebound any time you sin. This is taught in 1 JOH 1:9: If we confess [name] our sins [directly to God], He [God] is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, if you have never believed that Jesus Christ died on The Cross for all of your sins, all you have to do is say to yourself that you believe in Him and you are saved! The Bible verse which teaches us this is ACTS 16:31: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.”
As we end our study of The Gift of The Holy Spirit, let’s look at His Work in the lives of Non-Believers. The Holy Spirit’s Ministry begins in our lives before we become believers, and in fact, a person cannot become a believer apart from His Ministry. That’s why it’s so it’s important to understand it. His key work with non-Christians is to convict them concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment: “When he comes, he’ll expose the error of the godless world’s view of sin, righteousness, and judgment: He’ll show them that their refusal to believe in me is their basic sin; that righteousness comes from above, where I am with the Father, out of their sight and control; that judgment takes place as the ruler of this godless world is brought to trial and convicted.” (JOH 16:8-11 The Message Bible)
Now that He has been sent by God The Son, The Holy Spirit bears witness of Him, according to JOH 15:26 (New International Reader’s Version): “I will send the Friend to you from the Father. He is The Spirit of truth, who comes out from the Father. When the Friend comes to help you, he will be a witness about me.” Do you see what an important role our Mentor, The Holy Spirit plays in our Christian walk? Without The Holy’s Spirit’s Ministry, the non-believer would never be able to turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ. This is because no one understands or seeks God without The Holy Spirit’s Help. This is taught in ROM 3:11 (New International Reader’s Version): No one understands. No one trusts in God. The things of God are foolishness to unbelievers and would remain that way without The Holy Spirit: The person without The Spirit doesn’t accept the things that come from The Spirit of God. These things are foolish to them. They can’t understand them. In fact, such things can’t be understood without The Spirit’s help. (1 COR 2:14 New International Reader’s Version)
The Holy Spirit is the one that brings the sinner to conviction of guilt and the need for a Savior. He gets the sinner to understand that righteousness will only be found in Jesus Christ. If a non-Christian wants The Holy Spirit, they need to repent – which is simply having a change of mind about themselves, sin, and God. That change of mind demonstrates that The Holy Spirit is already at work to bring them to Salvation.
Now let’s look at The Work of The Holy Spirit and how His Ministries relate to the lives of believers. Each of His Ministries reveals why The Holy Spirit is the Best Gift that God can give to man. The Lord Jesus Christ used The Gift of The Holy Spirit as the Supreme Example of God’s Goodness. We can pray with confidence because we know that God is Good. And The Gift of The Holy Spirit proves this.
Regeneration is the first Ministry of The Holy Spirit to those who will be saved. Regeneration is what Jesus was talking about to Nicodemus when He told him that he had to be born again. Regeneration is The Spiritual Birth that comes by God’s Grace and makes a person who was dead in their transgressions alive! Paul puts it perfectly in EPH 2:1-6 (The Message Bible): It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
TIT 3:5–7 (New International Reader’s Version) takes this idea even further: He saved us. It wasn’t because of the good things we had done. It was because of his mercy. He saved us by washing away our sins. We were born again. The Holy Spirit gave us new life. God poured out The Spirit on us freely. That’s because of what Jesus Christ our Savior has done. His grace made us right with God. So now we have received the hope of eternal life as God’s children. Without The Holy Spirit’s Ministry to quicken the mind to believe and regenerate the soul to new life, no individual can be saved.
The Baptism of The Holy Spirit is another of His Ministries. At the moment of Salvation, The Holy Spirit, by means of His Omnipotence, enters the believer into union with Christ, making the Church-Age believer part of The Royal Family of God forever.
Another Ministry is The Indwelling of The Spirit which begins at Baptism. As already mentioned, this differs in the Church-Age because His Indwelling is continual in the Christian as compared to His coming and going in the Old Testament. In ROM 8:9 (New International Reader’s Version) Paul writes: But you are not ruled by the power of sin. Instead, the Holy Spirit rules over you. This is true if the Spirit of God lives in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Christ.
The Sealing of the Holy Spirit, another Ministry, is a signature guarantee in which His very Seal is put upon an eternal contract with each born-again believer. This is taught in EPH 1:13 (New International Reader’s Version): You also became believers in Christ. That happened when you heard the message of truth. It was the good news about how you could be saved. When you believed, he stamped you with an official mark. That official mark is the Holy Spirit that he promised. The Sealing of The Spirit guarantee’s three things: the guarantee of Eternal Salvation, the guarantee of Eternal Security, and the guarantee of our Portfolio of Invisible Assets. In your portfolio of invisible assets, God provided everything necessary to function in life, growing in grace, in the execution and fulfillment of the Predesigned Plan of God and in dying, and eternity.
Another Ministry is The Anointing of The Spirit which comes at Salvation and is also related to His Indwelling. Anointing with oil in the Old Testament was used to signify that a person had been set apart as a priest or king. The anointing of The Spirit comes from God and signifies His appointing us and helping us serve The Lord. Our spiritual gifts are related to this.
The Spirit will continue to convict the believer of sin and righteousness so that sins are confessed, and holiness is pursued. His work of Sanctification removes the Christian from previous sinful ways of life, transforming him into the image of the Lord’s Glory. That is important and related to it is the fact that even when our sins grieve The Holy Spirit and hinder His Work in our lives, He still remains in us.
The Holy Spirit will continue to teach the believer. This is often referred to as His Illumination by which He gives wisdom and discernment about the things of God, establishing the mind of Christ in the Christian. The Holy Spirit leads the believer into a closer walk with Him so that the deeds of the flesh are replaced with His Fruit. Since followers of Christ live in a constant state of spiritual warfare, walking in The Spirit is critical to being able to stand firm against the adversary, the devil.
The Holy Spirit also gives Spiritual Gifts and the Divine Power needed to exercise them. The Apostles received the power to proclaim Christ only after The Holy Spirit came upon them. Over time, The Holy Spirit will reveal The Spiritual Gifts to believers as they step out in faith to serve The Lord.
We are commanded to be filled with The Spirit in EPH 5:18 (New International Reader’s Version): Don’t fill yourself up with wine. Getting drunk will lead to wild living. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit. To be filled with The Holy Spirit means to be controlled by Him and it takes place as you yield to His Influence. It is a command that’s done continually and not something that happens just one time.
The final ministry of The Holy Spirit is The Intercession. ROM 8:26-27 (New International Reader’s Version) tells us: In the same way, the Holy Spirit helps us when we are weak. We don’t know what we should pray for. But the Spirit himself prays for us. He prays through groans too deep for words. God, who looks into our hearts, knows the mind of the Spirit. And the Spirit prays for God’s people just as God wants him to pray. We should find great comfort in knowing that The Holy Spirit is interceding for us with God The Father, and even more so during those times when we don’t know how to pray. We often don’t know what Our Lord’s specific Will might be in a particular situation. We may be overwhelmed emotionally so that we do not know how to pray other than perhaps to plead for His Mercy. We can take comfort that The Holy Spirit always knows exactly how to pray on our behalf.
The Holy Spirit is a true Gift. Think about all He does! He convicts, regenerates, baptizes, indwells, seals, anoints, sanctifies, illumines, leads, empowers, fills, and makes intercession. There is nothing God could give us that is better than The Gift of The Holy Spirit. His multiple Ministries prove how God good is. We can be confident that His goodness will enable us to continue to strive to stay in God’s Pre-Designed Plan for our lives.