TEEN TREE 
OF LIFE
THE HOLY SPIRIT
Part 5
June 17, 2018
BEFORE we begin, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, take a moment to name your sins to God the Father. This will allow you to be filled with the power of The Holy Spirit as you read this booklet (EPH 5:18 & 1JOH1:9). IF YOU HAVE never believed in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you have that opportunity right now. Simply tell God the Father that you are believing on His Son Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. If you make that decision, you are now a believer and will always be a child of God! When you die, you will spend eternity with Him forever in heaven! (JOH 3:16 & ACT 16:31)
We have been looking at Rebound and its result – the Filling of The Holy Spirit. We noted the Filling of The Holy Spirit is temporary. It goes away when we sin and of course, everybody sins! This is why Rebound is so important. It’s the only way to become filled again and in doing so, to stay in God’s Plan. But remember that regardless of whether we are filled with The Spirit or not, we are always indwelt by Him. We cannot lose the Indwelling of The Holy Spirit. This is taught in JOH 10:27-30: “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” When believers confess their sins to God in His Son’s Name, they are not only restored to fellowship with God, but they are also filled with The Spirit. This is what JOH 10:27-30 is all about!
Every believer has a series of four mandates regarding The Holy Spirit, two positive, two negative:
- Be filled with The Holy Spirit. (EPH 5:18)
- Keep walking by means of The Holy Spirit. (GAL 5:16)
- Do not grieve The Holy Spirit. (EPH 4:30)
- Do not quench The Holy Spirit. (1THES 5:19)
To produce Divine Good, you have to be filled with The Holy Spirit and keep walking by means of the Spirit. But if we grieve or quench The Holy Spirit, we are out of fellowship with Him and we cannot produce Divine Good. Without rebound, The Holy Spirit is grieved and quenched, the Christian way of life disintegrates.
Now, we are going to look at The Holy Spirit in the Millennium. The Millennium is the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. It lasts from His second advent (the second time He comes to earth) to the end of human history. The Millennium was prophesied throughout the Old Testament and you can read about it in Revelations 20. During Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’s Millennial reign, here on earth, God The Holy Spirit will also have a Ministry for believers of that Age. Believers in the Millennium will be indwelt by The Holy Spirit just like believers of the current Church-Age. This is taught in the Old Testament, too: I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. (EZEK 36:27)
Believers in the Millennium will also have the filling of The Holy Spirit as we do today as we learn in ZECH 12:10: “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.”
Now we are going to study the Universal Convicting Ministry of The Holy Spirit. This is plainly taught in ROM 10:13: For “WHOEVER WILL CALL ON THE NAME OF THE LORD WILL BE SAVED.” Because man is born spiritually dead, he cannot be effective at two points in his life as an unbeliever. The first is at the point of hearing the Gospel message and the second is at the point of believing the Gospel message.
Real spiritual death is the condition of all mankind, at the moment of physical birth. This is when God imputes Adam’s original sin to each one of us. As a real imputation, Adam’s original sin is imputed to the genetically-formed Old Sin Nature in the cell structure of the body of every new born baby. At the same time, God creates human life and imputes it to the soul – at the point of physical birth. Therefore, every baby is born dichotomous, having a body and soul being physically alive, yet having no human spirit and being spiritually dead. (The word dichotomous means divided into two parts.) So, being born physically alive with human life in the soul, the new born also is spiritually dead where there is no spiritual life. That means that the new born cannot have a personal relation with God and it cannot understand anything related to the spiritual life, including Bible doctrine and the Gospel.
There are three basic characteristics of real Spiritual Death. The first characteristic is total depravity, including the trend toward both moral and immoral degeneration. A person will eventually become either morally or immorally degenerate apart from two categories of restraint: The laws of Divine Establishment that motivate a certain category of virtue in unbelievers. There are four areas to God’s Divine Establishment, all of which are oriented to a system of authority: 1) volition (authority over one’s own soul), 2) marriage (authority of the husband over the wife), 3) family (authority of the parents over the children), and 4) nationalism (authority of the government over the citizens). The second category of restraint is regeneration which motivates an even greater virtue in believers who learn Bible doctrine. Regeneration is being born again.
The second characteristic is total separation from God. Obviously, if you are spiritually dead, you are totally separate from God.
The third is total helplessness in establishing a relationship with God. God must have a relationship with us, just as He did with our original parents in the garden. The problem of dichotomy means that having only a soul and body, we cannot comprehend spiritual phenomena. And as you know, it takes a spiritual person to understand the spiritual phenomena of God’s Word which is taught to us by God The Holy Spirit: … which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. (1COR 2:13) Because all mankind is in the status of spiritual death, the work of Salvation must be the Work of God on behalf of each one of us. That work begins with dealing with our spiritual death.
All Three Persons in the Godhead are involved in establishing our relationship with God. God the Father is the author of the fantastic Salvation Plan for the human race. His Plan called for Him to impute and judge all our sins to Christ on the Cross. This is a cool translation of 2Cor 5:20-21 from The Message Bible: We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you. How? you ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God.
Now let’s look at God the Son’s work in establishing our relationship with God The Father. Jesus Christ received the imputation and was judged for our all of our sins. His shout of “Tetelestai” in JOH 19:30 proved that salvation was completed on the Cross: Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” [tetelestai] And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.
God The Holy Spirit performs several functions for the spiritually dead human race to enable them to have a relationship with God The Father. His first ministry is the Pre-Salvation Clarification of the Gospel. This is classified theologically as the Doctrine of Common Grace. Where there is positive response to the Gospel, God The Holy Spirit takes the faith of the spiritually dead person and makes it effective for Salvation.
The Common Grace Ministry of The Holy Spirit is described in JOH 16:8-11: And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment; concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me; and concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you no longer see Me; and concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged. And in EPH 1:13: … in Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth [Common Grace], the gospel of your salvation [content of Common Grace], —having also believed, you were sealed in Him with The Holy Spirit of promise.
At the point of hearing the Gospel, the unbeliever is spiritually dead. He is totally helpless and cannot have a relationship with God. He has no human spirit to understand the Spiritual things of God and cannot understand spiritual phenomena. This is described in 1COR 2:14: But a natural [soulish] man [unbeliever] does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. So, in evangelism and personal witnessing, God The Holy Spirit acts in the place of the unbeliever’s human spirit so that he or she can understand the Gospel message. That is the Common Grace ministry of The Holy Spirit to all unbelievers.
It is “common” because all members of the human race receive the empowerment to understand the Gospel by The Holy Spirit when they hear it. It is “grace” because God The Holy Spirit does all the work of making it understandable and we do not earn or deserve that empowerment, yet God does it for us out of love, righteousness, and justice.
{to be continued}