Reflection on God's Word

BEING AWARE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

by Tim Thomas

April 4, 2005

Ephesian 1:13-16

When we believe in our Lord Jesus Christ for our salvation, we are given the Holy Spirit to live in us (see vv 13-14 above, as well as Romans 8:9). The Holy Spirit living in us is not just supposed to be a doctrinal point of view -- an expressed belief -- rather, it is supposed to be an experiential reality. The wording in the NIV here says that the Holy Spirit is a "seal" and a "deposit guaranteeing our inheritance". Yet a seal and a guarantee are useless if they are not tangible. They are supposed to be signs that can be pointed to if there is ever any doubt. Yet many believers do not seem to be aware of the Holy Spirit living within them. They do not feel His presence or hear His voice. This ought to be of utmost concern to all who minister to brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ.

A number of times I have tried to assure new believers when they doubted that they had truly been saved. I tried to remind them of what the Scriptures say about salvation through faith alone, and God not rejecting anyone, and how joyful He is when a sinner repents. ("You believe that Jesus died for you, don't you? You confessed your sins, didn't you? You invited Him into your heart, and sincerely promised that you would always follow Him, didn't you? Then of course you are saved!") Verses 13 and 14 above tell us that reassuring people of their salvation by reviewing Biblical truth is an incomplete response. God wants each of us who have put our faith in Jesus to have an awareness of the Holy Spirit within us, so we have an assurance and a certainty from God directly that God has accepted us as His own dearly loved children, and that now and forevermore, we will be with Him. This perspective is confirmed in 1 John 4:13, Romans 8:23 and in 2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:5. When dear ones come to us with uncertainty about their salvation, we need to help them become attuned to the Holy Spirit within them.

Some people reading this would honestly put themselves in the category of having answered all the questions correctly and done everything they know to do to be saved, and yet do not have a living, real awareness of the Holy Spirit in them. If that is so, this meditation on God's Word has probably stirred a longing, or perhaps even fear and doubting, in you. I hope it has stirred the former rather than the latter, because the last thing I want to do is to create a negative crisis of faith. All of us, on the other hand, need to be stirred from time to time to have a longing for the reality of God at operation in our hearts and lives. So I say to you, "Do not fear, for God is greater than your doubts." He will not leave you in a place of uncertainty. It was His idea for the Holy Spirit to be a seal and a guarantee.

The problem for some of us is that the Holy Spirit is very gentle and quiet -- a still small voice. Since we came to put our trust in Jesus, the Holy Spirit has been speaking to us. But the voice of the Holy Spirit in us is often easily mistaken for our own voice (meaning our thoughts), and all this time we may have been experiencing God and thinking that it was us! Evidence of the Holy Spirit speaking to us and being in operation in our lives is whether we have been seeing the fruit of the Spirit maturing in us (Galatians 5:22-23: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control"), and whether we are becoming more Christlike (Romans 12:2). If you can observe a Christ-likeness since you invited Jesus into your life, then indeed you clearly have the Holy Spirit working in you. What you need to focus on is becoming aware of inner workings that lead you to become like Jesus and do what is right.

Some of you may be new believers and therefore may not have had sufficient time for the fruit of the Spirit to become apparent in you, or you have been believers for so long (perhaps from the earliest days that you can remember) that you cannot tell whether you are different than you were before your salvation. I would like to challenge you to try to be more sensitive to the inner voices that you hear. All of us talk to ourselves in our heads. Sometimes demonic forces talk to us, trying to plant lies as truths, so that we will be pulled away from God. And of course the Holy Spirit talks to us. It is a challenge for newer believers, in particular, to discern the true origin of each thought. As our knowledge of the Bible improves, it gets easier, but it is difficult for me even now to know with complete certainty the source of everything I hear.

We see later in Ephesians (5:18) that we should strive to be filled with the Holy Spirit. So while in some sense you either have the Holy Spirit in you or you don't, it is also true that there are degrees of having the Holy Spirit. Whether you literally have a greater quantity of the Holy Spirit, I cannot say. In practice, however, this is equivalent to saying that we need to have the Holy Spirit in operation in our lives to the highest possible extent. That is, to the extent that we will indeed be aware of Him in operation, and for that matter, that others will be aware of Him in operation in our lives. Luke 11:13 tells us that if we persistently and continually ask for the Holy Spirit, God will indeed grant our request. Together with Ephesians 5:18, we might see this verse not as a one-time receiving of the Holy Spirit, but rather a continual desire to have a vibrant awareness of God in our lives. It encourages us to ask God for a greater measure of the Holy Spirit operating in our lives, so much so that He is overflowing from us and affecting those around us. May this be so for all of us who sincerely follow the Lord! And especially for those who have not been very aware of the seal and guarantee of the Holy Spirit within you, this is a prayer that is asking God to turn up the volume!