Spiritual Counsels IV: The Holy Spirit Necessity | Behold Your God Podcast

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Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratiae, and I'm here again with Dr.

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John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany in New Albany, Mississippi, and the author and host of the

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Behold Your God study series for Media Gratiae. This is our third episode where we've been getting some help from essays written by Thomas Charles, which we were taken from Thomas Charles' spiritual counsels, on the operations of the

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Spirit in the life of the believer, part of a larger series where we're trying to get some helps and just walking with the

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Lord from Thomas Charles. Today we have the last look on the operations of the

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Holy Spirit. Yeah, and in this segment, what Charles is going to do to bring all of this to a close is, really he's going to force us to face two realities, two great implications, so that we take what he says about the

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Spirit very seriously. The first is the necessity and the importance of having the

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Spirit, and that that is evident. He writes, The Spirit is the life and soul of all true religion, the conveyor of all spiritual consolation, the implanter and nourisher of every grace and holy disposition.

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Without Him, whatever we are, we have only a name to live and are indeed dead whilst we live.

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We can no more live spiritually in fellowship with God without the Spirit than we can live in a natural life without breathing.

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Wonderful words he uses to describe the role of the Spirit there in the life of a believer. He says,

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He is the life and soul of all true religion. He is the conveyor of all spiritual consolation.

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He is the implanter and nourisher of every grace and holy disposition.

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He is the light, the life, and the energy in Christianity. So if these things are true, and biblically we believe these are true, then we have to stop and ask ourselves, well, then what would religion be without the

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Spirit? What if I'm just a church member? What if I just show up and kind of tip my hat to the

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Lord one day a week or so? But God has not invaded this life.

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I am not His, and He is not my beloved. And so all

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I have is kind of a name, the name of religion. Then what do you have? Well, you have a religion without any life, without any soul, without any true spiritual consolation, without any grace implanted or nourished and maintained, without any light, life, or energy.

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And I think many of us who attended church long before we knew the grace of the Lord would have to say, well, yeah, that's the religion

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I had. Now if we think, well, but I have a Bible, and my preacher preaches from the

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Bible, that's not enough, Charles says. We need the work of the Spirit as well. He gives one proof of the need of the

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Spirit by reminding us, as you said, that even the Scriptures, the perfect revelation of God that's been given for us, that even these are not sufficient if they are approached apart from the ongoing work of the

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Spirit. He writes, the Scriptures without the Spirit are at best only a dead letter, un -efficacious and un -animating, and we have in our best frames only the form of godliness without its power.

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Yeah, so an un -animating Word of God, what a terrible thing. You know, it reminds us of the statement that God gave through Amos that there would be a famine in the land for hearing the

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Word of the God. It doesn't mean that no one would, you know, say Bible stuff, but it no longer have that impact.

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Or, you know, we think of the book of Revelation and the warning that God would remove the candles from the churches.

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And, you know, so we still show up and we still hear Bible phrases being read and talks, you know, kind of centering around these biblical accounts or these parables, but in the end, no effective power if the

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Spirit is not in our Christianity. So, if that's true, that even the

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Scriptures alone are not enough, then surely the Christian, we have a duty to constantly live in the awareness of the need of His continual work.

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Yeah, so Charles presses the believer with a series of questions, and these are easily read, but they're not so easily answered.

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He writes, Is the Spirit daily within us convincing us of sin and taking of the things of Christ and showing them to us in still clearer light and with more transforming efficacy?

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Are we going on from strength to strength and also from glory to glory, seeing new glories and new excellencies in Christ and Him crucified?

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There is no other means of comfort and sanctification provided by the Father, nor any possible way of walking humbly with God.

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So, pretty penetrating questions. Is He daily convincing you of sin?

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Is He daily showing you the things of Christ in an ever clearer way that affects you?

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You know, not has He, but is He? You know, I don't think that I, not every week in my life could

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I wake up and say, yeah, yeah, you know, without any hesitation. It's just going up and up and up. Yeah, it's just wonderful.

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He's wonderful, but John, are you walking in humility before the Holy Spirit so that you could say, yes, daily

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He is showing me new areas that I didn't recognize before where sin has been hidden, and I'm able by His grace to deal with those.

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And yes, He is showing me more and more of the preciousness and the fullness of Christ so that it's a joy to do those things.

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And then He asks a question about us. Are we going daily from strength to strength?

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I mean, so that again is a pretty penetrating question. You know, how are you doing? Well, I'm okay, you know, we say to people.

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Like, how has your week been? It's okay. What would we say if someone honestly cornered us and say, but by the

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Spirit's work are you going from strength to strength? And we don't ever want to reach a place in our

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Christianity where we're okay for that not to be a description of us.

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If the answer has to be no to those things, then really, you know, one good place to start is to ask ourselves, you know, am

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I not walking in a dependence on the Spirit? Am I not walking in harmony with Him? Do I have a religion without the

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Holy Spirit? Yeah. So Charles argues that all of God's gifts to us, we must not be willing to do without any of them.

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We can't go without the presence and the work of His Spirit, even if we lose other comforts.

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And he writes it like this. Oh, pray earnestly that God would not take His Holy Spirit from us.

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Though He take away all your outward comforts and make you as poor and afflicted as Job, yet the

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Holy Spirit being within you can bring you effectual peace and comfort. Let Him make the cross ever so heavy, empty you from vessel to vessel, cause you to be destitute, afflicted, and tormented.

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Still the Holy Spirit being within you can fill your hearts with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

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And we do have the testimony and the witness of the church that this is the case.

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When he says pray that God would not take His Holy Spirit from us, I mean, we're not talking about that you can go from having the

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Holy Spirit to not having the Holy Spirit. But he is meaning in that experiential and effectual way, right?

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Yeah, in the sense that, you know, again, Revelation 3, where Christ is speaking in a disciplinary way to the church of Laodicea, saying

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I am outside the church. Well, they haven't lost their salvation, but that sweet sense of the effective working in the nearness, the intimacy, the uninterrupted fellowship between them and their

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Lord has been lost. There is an experiential distance even though He still dwells in them.

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You know, when we hear all of these wonderful things the Spirit does, we might be tempted to believe the lie of the enemy.

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When He comes up to the Christian and says, well, you don't think that God would really be willing to give a person like you, you know, these ever greater ongoing, you know, evidences of His love through the work of the

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Spirit. And Thomas Charles speaks to that in this essay. He writes, this is a blessing which we are sure

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God never did nor ever will deny to anyone that asks it of Him.

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If ye being evil, saith Christ, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly

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Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? To them that ask Him be they who they will.

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He is surely given willingly and freely. Ask and ye shall have is

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His gracious declaration. And those who seek this blessing, He will never send empty away.

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Well, it's a good time for us to stop in the middle of these quotes from Thomas Charles and ask this question.

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Why is a believer being told by this pastor to ask for the

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Spirit? Don't we already have the Holy Spirit? I mean, after all, he's just spent a lot of time in an essay saying that there isn't any way to come to Christ except by the convicting work of the

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Spirit. And there isn't any way to really understand and appropriate the privileges that Christ has purchased for us through the gospel grabbed hold of by faith.

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There isn't any way to even see these and appreciate them without the work of the Spirit. So, how is it that he's saying to the believer, ask for the

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Spirit? And I think we have a couple of passages that can kind of help us.

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First of all is the parable that he's referring to really and using as a paradigm for this out of Luke chapter 11.

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Yes, so then Jesus said, Suppose one of you has a friend and goes to him at midnight and says to him,

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Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has come to me from a journey and I have nothing to set before him.

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And from inside he answers and says, Do not bother me. The door has already been shut and my children and I are in bed.

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I cannot get up and give you anything. I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence, he will get up and give him as much as he needs.

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So I say to you, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find.

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Knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives.

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And he who seeks, finds. And to him who knocks, it will be opened.

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Now suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for a fish. He will not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he?

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Or if he is asked for an egg, he will not give him a scorpion, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your

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Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? In the parable, it's always helpful to back up and say,

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Well, what's the main point here? And the main point, we could say, is the goodness of the Father and the willingness to respond to the seeking of His people and to give good gifts.

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This does show up in other places in the Gospels, but Luke is the only one that ends it just like this, where he says the

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Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him. Again, the Holy Spirit is the one who has been sent by the

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Father and the Son to initiate spiritual life in us in the work of regeneration. He's the one that makes us alive to God.

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He's the one that gives us the desire and the ability to repent and believe, and the one who sustains all of that throughout all of our lives, transforming, growing, preserving us until we see

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Christ face to face and the work is completed in glorification. But is conversion, think about the coming of the

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Spirit and conversion, is that the end of His work? Well, no, as we've mentioned, it keeps going.

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So, the logic is this, then it is not wrong to continue to ask for the

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Spirit in ever greater measures of His influence. Another passage that might help is in Ephesians 3, where Paul's prayer for the

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Ephesians. He's seen asking for things that they already have, but he's praying that they will have them.

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And I think in that paradox, we'll find an answer to why Thomas Charles is talking that way.

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Matt, can you read for us Ephesians 3, 14 through 19? Yeah, if what we're saying isn't right, then what do you do with a passage like this, where Paul writes to Christians and he says,

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For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, that you might be filled up to all the fullness of God.

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Clearly in this prayer, Paul is talking to a group of people that already have Christ dwelling in their hearts by faith.

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But he's praying that by the work of the Spirit, they may have that. So obviously what Paul is asking for in that context is an ever greater measure of something that they already have.

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So when we think of the work of the Spirit, we're asking God to give us a greater measure of that effective work, of that intimacy, of His continued sweet influences in our life transforming.

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But we're asking for the same kind of work that we've been talking about in these past episodes, the same categories.

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So sanctification, comforting, the guarantee of His sealing, the earnest enjoyed.

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We're not asking for some strangely different category that maybe we've heard of from people saying, well, my church had revival and these strange things happened.

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And you look in the Scripture and you don't find any basis for them. But because someone says the Holy Spirit did it, you kind of feel bad to say, well, actually,

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I don't want that. But you should say, I don't want that if it's not scriptural. So same categories, but an ever expanding, ever continuing enjoyment of a greater degree of those.

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Yeah, what's been called the second blessing. So it's great you're a Christian, you have Jesus, you have the

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Spirit, but you need to have the second blessing where you then go from sort of being a B -level

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Christian to like an empowered A -level Christian. That's not at all what we're talking about. But it is correct to say that we are asking for a third blessing and a fourth blessing and a hundredth blessing and a thousandth blessing in the sense that just as we received forgiveness when we were saved, so we go on asking for forgiveness.

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And just as we received the gift of faith and repentance when we first believed, we go on asking for greater faith and greater repentance.

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Well, we received the Spirit and we received all the Spirit when we first believed.

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And yet we go on asking for greater and greater manifestations of the

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Spirit, not to have, you know, quote, superpowers, but to do the things that we've already been talking about, to see more of our sin, to deal with it, to hate it, and to see more of Christ's perfect sufficiency for it and to be convinced of it, and to live in the power that comes from believing the gospel.

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That is the entire life of the believer. And it's not a second, but it is a third, fourth, hundredth, thousandth.

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And if the final battle tarries, it might be the millionth blessing.

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Right. If we think of the Spirit as the Bible reveals Him, He's not an it,

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He's a Him, third person of the Trinity. In the same way that the Father and the Son are persons, the

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Spirit is a person. So we're not talking about being filled like a cup filled with water. It's more like a house being filled by a person.

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And so, you know, in a sense, the rest of our Christian life, it begins with Him moving in, and then it continues with us walking to each door with Him and saying to Him, take that room too.

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And, you know, throw open the doors to this room to Him. And search every corner. And what do you want to do with this room?

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And then the next room, and the next room, until His perfect divine influence, you know, radiates through every part of our personality.

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That leads us to the last part, the last great reality that He points out to us to help us to take these things seriously.

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And that is that it's obvious that a Christian must be very careful not to grieve the

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Spirit. And He compares this with the unpardonable sin. Not that they are the same thing, but it's a serious sin.

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And the unpardonable sin is a sin that sometimes that phrase really causes genuine believers to get kind of hung up, you know.

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Paralyzing despair creeps in for some because they don't understand what it is, and they would say, well,

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I probably have done that. And so He gives a nice, helpful description in this essay of what is the unpardonable sin.

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He says, next to the unpardonable sin, this doubtless is the most aggravated and the most provoking to God, the sin of grieving the

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Spirit. The unpardonable sin is a deliberate and final rejection of the

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Spirit in all His gracious operations as a comforter and sanctifier, which includes a virtual rejection of the whole economy of redemption, of the love of the

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Father, and of the grace of the Son, in which the Spirit comes to reveal and seal to us.

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Then He goes on to define and describe the grieving of the Spirit. He says the grieving of the Spirit partakes also in some degree of the same rebellion and guilt.

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And we grieve Him when we take little or no notice of His amazing condescension and love in coming freely and willingly to be our comforter and sanctifier.

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When we study to make no returns of love by bringing forth in a holy walk and conversation the fruits of the

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Spirit, and when it may be by careless neglect and unwatchfulness we fall into those habits and those courses which

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He abhors, He cannot pass by unnoticed the unkindness and ingratitude thereby shown.

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But He is grieved and greatly displeased, though in this there is no willful rejection of the

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Spirit, yet there is a great disregard and an undervaluing of His consolations, especially if we fall into such courses after long and abundance experience of His comforts.

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So the unpardonable sin, He says, is a deliberate rejection of the

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Spirit. And the love of all members of God. Yes, the entirety of redemption's plan in love.

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Final and deliberate, He says. But grieving, He says, is not necessarily a rejection of the

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Spirit. It's just through a carelessness, through a selfishness, we embrace things that grieve

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Him. And He cannot pass by those without being grieved. And we should not let the enemy paint that in dark colors for us.

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Because when we think about God biblically, we understand that God isn't like us in the sense that He's not driven by emotions.

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So when we read things like the Spirit is grieved, we're reading an anthropomorphic description.

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We're describing God. The Bible is describing God using a human -like quality.

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So that we're like little children that we can get some idea. It's like this. So there is something about sin in us that causes something in God.

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And the closest thing that we can think of to it is grief. That God is always in His moral perfection, in His perfect holy love.

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He always is towards sin in His children. He is always grief toward that.

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So when we think of that though, why? Why is that an appropriate metaphor to describe

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God's thoughts of sin in His children? Charles writes, When we put obstructions in His way as He discharges

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His office, and we still promote our own misery, how is the spirit of love grieved?

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It is much, if bitter experience teach us not, how grievous the sin is.

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So love for holiness, yes. But also this extraordinary and unexpected delight in doing

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His people good. And He cannot see us choose this soul -murdering option of sin without grieving that we've done that.

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And every person that loves understands that. I mean you don't have to be married and have kids to understand that. But having kids is a pretty clear example.

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You have children. You love them. You see them make choices that you know will hurt them. Maybe even as adult children, like the long -term kind of pain.

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And you grieve over that. It's not because you're angry and you want to take their head off. It's because you love them.

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He comes down really to some final exhortations. And there are a whole string of commands

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He gives here in our next quote. So Charles presses us with the following exhortation.

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He says, Let us therefore above all things attend to His motions and beware of a barren and unfruitful profession of religion and of defiling by secret indulgences the temple and habitation of the

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Spirit. So three simple commands, three simple applications before He comes to the end of this essay.

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And we've spent a long time on this essay. So we don't want to do that and then not slow down and ask ourselves some hard questions.

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Do you, do I attend to His motions? The Scripture is open.

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The Word is there. The heart is moved. Sin is exposed. Beautiful things of Christ are laid before you.

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Are you responsive? Are you, do you have to be like the horse with the bitten bridle?

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You're pulled forward, pulled away from your favorite sin, pulled toward the things of God. Or are you like the servant that the merest look of the master and you know

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His will and there's the response. So are we attending to His motions?

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Are we being careful to beware an unfruitful profession in religion? So lots of great words, you know, lots of podcasts, lots of Bible studies, lots of sermons, lots of church, not much fruit.

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And are we being careful to beware the defiling influence of secret indulgences if God has in the person of His Spirit taken up residence in our spirit, in our soul?

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Are we careful to make sure that we make this home of our life, this heart, the kind of place that matches

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His delights. It's clean. It's uncluttered. Now that the

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Puritan film is out and shipping after two years of working together with Reformation Heritage Books and Puritan Reform Theological Seminary, we're here in Tupelo, Mississippi where we've gathered some friends and family together just to screen the film as a way to celebrate.

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We spoke to one family who'd come out to see the film. First the father, Scott, and then two teenagers,

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Claire and John. I just think it paints a picture of their, you know how John Piper was saying, it's more, not necessarily worldview, just like your heart for heart for the

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Lord. And I just feel like it painted a very good picture of what they stood for, what they were desiring. And I think that's the most important thing, not necessarily who they were, what time period they're from, but just like what they believed in, what they were striving for.

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So I think that. So somebody my age that's not familiar with who the

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Puritans are, or really, you know, close in their walk with God, I think it'd be an eye -opening experience and a conviction.

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But I think it's conviction even to the one who's walking closest to Christ. It's still a conviction to, okay,

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I'm still so far, there's so much more to Him than we ever hoped or imagined.

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So yeah, I think it would be a great endeavor for anybody to watch this and learn and just open your mind to so much more.

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For more information about Puritan All of Life to the Glory of God, visit TheMeansofGrace .org

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Well, Charles closes his comments on this theme with a series of very searching questions, both negative and positive.

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So first the negative. He writes, Is it possible that we should make such base returns for such love and be such enemies to our own happiness?

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Alas, what is man? In what dust and ashes ought even the best of us to lie down before him?

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And then finally the positive. He says, Shall we not rather take notice of His love and His kindness and thankfully receive all our comforts from His hands and observe

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His love and grace in every refreshing thought put into our minds? Yea, shall we not carefully watch and promote all

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His strivings and motions within us and cheerfully comply with them, however self -denying and contrary to flesh and blood?

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When He convinces of sin, let us set our hearts mightily against it. When He speaks comfort, let us hear

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Him as the Lord our Comforter, making known the riches of love and grace in the

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Father and the Son to our souls. And when we have no comfort, walking in darkness and having no light, let us honor

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Him by looking to and waiting for Him only. For our light in darkness, our joy in sorrow, and our peace in trouble.

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