HCC Monthly Harvest Seed

I love to teach and preach on the Holy Spirit.  It is also one of the most humbling and fearful things I do as a preacher.  You see, the Holy Spirit is a person.  If I talk about Him incorrectly, I misrepresent who He is.  If I just talk about Him to you it will come across as gossip as if He is not here with us. 

As a person, the Holy Spirit has a personality, He has character (The Fruit of the Spirit), He has emotions and feelings, opinions, a will and desires.  The Holy Spirit loves, He can be jealous, angry and kind.  He goes where He wants to go and does what He will do.  He is powerful like wind, refreshing like a rain and life giving, unyielding and terrain shaping like a river.  He is also as gentle as a dove and as passionate as a flame of fire.  He is not just the power of God, He is not just a force to be reckoned with, He is not just the anointing and equipping of God in the life of a Christian.  He is a person.  Do you know Him like that?

You can hurt a person. A person can be hurt intentionally or unintentionally.  There are many ways that you can do that.  One way we can hurt the Holy Spirit is by grieving Him.  I’m sure you are like me in that you never set out purposefully to bring grief into any of your relationships.  The modern idea of grief is to annoy someone, we are “causing them grief” or “giving them grief”;  but that is not really grieving someone.  I mean if you are intentionally setting out to annoy or grieve someone you really do not have a great relationship in the first place.

Grieved means to make sad or sorrowful, or to make a heart heavy or to disappoint.  For some reason there is some big mystery surrounding what it means to grieve the Holy Spirit.  The word grieve comes from a Greek word which denotes a pain or grief that can only be experienced between two people who deeply love each other.  This word would normally be used to picture a husband or wife who has discovered that their spouse has been unfaithful.  As a result of this unfaithfulness, the betrayed spouse is shocked, devastated, hurt, wounded, and grieved because of the pain that accompanies unfaithfulness or adultery. 

This tells us, first of all, that the relationship that exists between us and the Holy Spirit is precious!  The Holy Spirit is deeply in love with us.  Just as someone in love thinks about, dreams of, and cherishes the one they love, the Holy Spirit longs for us, thinks about us, desires to be close to us, and wants to reveal Himself to us.

To grieve the Holy Spirit means that when He looks at our life of sin there is a sense of loss, of intense disappointment and betrayal, just as if someone had died.  The Holy Spirit is the One who lives in us, leads us, guides us, teaches us, reminds us, comforts us, seals us, sanctifies us, empowers us, and works to produce the character of Christ in us.  He has been sent to reveal the will of God, which is the mind of Christ and to give us the victory in Christ.  But when we act like the world, talk like the world, behave like the world, and respond the same way the world does, we cause the Spirit of God to feel shock, hurt, and grief.

When we deliberately do what is wrong, we drag Him right into the mire of sin with us, because He lives in us and goes wherever we go.

Another way we can hurt the Holy Spirit its to quench Him.                    1 Thessalonians 5:19-22 - Do not quench the Spirit. (AMP) - Do not quench [subdue, or be unresponsive to the working and guidance of] the [Holy] Spirit.

To quench means to: to extinguish, to suppress, stifle divine influence.  You quench your thirst by drinking water and in this sense, this is a good thing, you can also quench a fire by pouring water on it.  If the fire is out of control this is a good thing, if it is there for warmth or cooking this is not a good thing.  Some people are afraid to let the Holy Spirit work through their lives or churches in supernatural ways.  We quench the Holy Spirit when we resist allowing Him to move.  We can also quench the Holy Spirit’s work in a church or in our life by refusing to recognize that God is a God of order and not chaos.  He is the God of the controlled burn and not a wildfire.

 A controlled burn can be raging, hot, glorious and powerful but, like the burning bush that Moses saw, it will consume us but not destroy us.  When churches and individual believers are open to the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, they will see the Glory of God.

One of the underlying principles of Harvest is that we desire to live in the presence of God and to live a life of relationship that results in the character of God in our lives and His power through our lives.  The Holy Spirit is welcome here because He is God with us.  May our lives never cause hurt to Him but always be a blessing and bring Him Glory.

You are dearly Loved
Pastor Marvin and Dawn