Lesson 1: 3 Essentials For This Study

Getting Started: On a scale of 1-10, how comfortable are you with the following statements? (1=not comfortable at all, 10=so comfortable I want to give it a big hug)

• The Spirit dwells in me. _____________
• The Spirit leads me. ______________
• I cannot be fruitful, except by the Spirit. ______________
• I am sealed for redemption by the Spirit. _____________
• God’s Spirit is my assurance of my future inheritance. ____________

1. It’s OK To NOT Know Some Things About The Holy Spirit

I hope it does not surprise you to read that I do not know everything about the Holy Spirit. The fact is you don’t want me to claim all knowledge on the subject, because error often springs from those who claim to perfectly understand a topic which God did not fully reveal. An historical example of this is the Lord’s Supper. What did Jesus mean when He said the bread “is my body”? At one point in church history a man named Thomas Aquinas applied the principles of scholasticism to the question. Scholasticism was the application of logic to the Bible in an attempt to understand the mysteries of the Scriptures. Aquinas began to reason about the “substance” and the “accidents” of the bread, concluding that the “substance” of the bread changed to the actual body of Christ, while its “accidents” (texture, taste, size, etc) remained the same. Thus, the concept of transubstantiation was given a logical foundation. Logical, but unscriptural.

Moses once said to the children of Israel, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.” (Deuteronomy 29:29) The point: there were some things that God did not reveal to Israel. Those things were secret, they remained with God. However, whatever God revealed belonged to them… and should be followed! It is likely that we will have questions about the Spirit which the Scriptures do not answer. That’s ok, the answer to those questions will remain secret. What we must do is study what God has revealed about the Spirit and abide by that knowledge.

2. Beware Of Reactionary Thinking

Reactionary thinking occurs when in an effort to respond to false or erroneous teachings, we either pervert the Scriptures ourselves or deny some of the truths that they teach. Here are a couple of examples:

• Many hold false views regarding the role of faith in salvation. Some claim that only “belief” is necessary and that no obedience is required for the forgiveness of sins. We would counter that the Scriptures clearly teach the necessity of baptism for sins to be forgiven (Mark 16.16; Acts 2.38). However, it would be reactionary to lessen the importance of faith and/or to ignore passages such as John 3.16; Ephesians 2.8-9; etc.
• Many denominations preach a doctrine of “once saved always saved”. This doctrine is in clear contradiction to Biblical teaching (1John 1; 2Peter 2; etc.), but we should not over-react and deny the assurance that belongs to us as Christians (1John 3.1-3; Eph. 1.3-14; etc.).

Reactionary thinking can be a very real problem when discussing the Holy Spirit because there are so many erroneous things said about the Spirit. Can you name some?

But these erroneous doctrines should not cause us to deny truths that are found in the Scriptures. For instance, the statements found at the beginning of the lesson are all true! The Spirit does dwell within the Christian (1Cor. 6.19), we are led by the Spirit (Romans 8.14), our fruitfulness depends on the Spirit (Gal. 5.22-25), the Spirit seals us (Eph. 1.13; 4.30) and our future inheritance is guaranteed by the Spirit (Eph. 1.14). We will discuss exactly what those statements mean in this study, but we must first acknowledge that they are Scriptural and true.

3. Being Biblical Must Be Our Motive

Sadly, it seems that many Holy Spirit discussions today are born of wrong motives. And this is true of people on all sides of the issue.  

• It has become vogue in many denominations to constantly speak of the Spirit’s “leading”, crediting God and the Spirit for every circumstance in life. We will discuss how the Spirit leads in a future lesson, but I fear that many are adopting such language to sound like others of our day. That’s the wrong motive.
• On the other side of the spectrum, some find any new understanding or teaching to be wrong and dangerous because it does not coincide with what has been traditionally taught. If our motive is to uphold a traditional doctrine, or church teaching, we have the wrong motive.

In short, our motive must be to follow what the Bible teaches on the subject. If our understanding of the Spirit matches what the Bible says, good. If the Bible reveals that our understanding is incomplete, then our understanding needs to grow. And if the Bible doesn’t answer all of our questions about the Spirit, then we need to accept that there are just some things we are not suppose to know.