Revisiting Rain

Since it has been forecasted to rain all week in Southern California, take a few minutes to meditate on this wonderful and miraculous gift -- rain.

http://allforthegloryofchrist.blogspot.com/2009/03/rain.html

Who is the Holy Spirit?

Let me pose a simple question. What is the Holy Spirit?

In the first place, spirit is another mode of being than matter. You can pick a thing up and bounce it around; that is matter. You and I are composed of matter. That head you have is matter. That is only one mode of existence, but there is another, and that is spirit.

The difference between matter and spirit is that matter possesses weight, size, color and extension in space. It can be measured and weighed and has form. But the Holy Spirit is not material, therefore He does not have weight or dimension or shape or extension in space.

One power of spirit is to penetrate matter and things and all substances. Your spirit, for instance, dwells in your body somewhere, and it penetrates your body without hurting the body. It is in there penetrating because it is another form.

When Jesus had risen from the dead and was no more mere matter, He came into a locked room through the wall somehow, and managed to penetrate and get into that room without unlocking the door. He could not have done that prior to his death, but He did it afterward. Spirit, then, is another kind of substance. It is different from material things and can penetrate personality. Your spirit can penetrate your personality. One personality can penetrate another personality. The Holy Spirit can penetrate your personality and your spirit. The Bible refers to this in 1 Corinthians, "For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God," (1 Corinthians 2:11 KJV). Therefore, the Spirit of God can penetrate the spirit of man.

Let me mention what the Holy Spirit is not.

The Holy Spirit is not enthusiasm. Some people get enthusiasm and imagine it is the Holy Spirit. They become worked up over a song thinking it is Spirit-anointed worship. And they imagine that is the Spirit. Enthusiasm is not the Holy Spirit, because those same people go out and live just like the world. The Holy Spirit never enters a man and then lets him live like the world. You can be sure of that.

Incidentally, that is the reason most people do not want to be filled with the Holy Spirit; they want to live the way they want to live and have the Holy Spirit as a bit of something extra, as you might have a diamond stickpin or something very beautiful on your clothing. They want the Holy Ghost to be something added, but the Holy Spirit will not be an addition. The Holy Spirit must be Lord or He will not come at all.

The Holy Spirit is not courage, or energy, or the personification of all good qualities, like Jack Frost is the personification of cold weather and Santa Claus the personification of wanting to give someone a tie. The Holy Spirit is not a personification of anything, but the Holy Spirit is a person just the same as you are a person. He has all the qualities of a person. The Holy Spirit has substance but not material substance. He has individuality. He is one being and not another. He has will and He has intelligence and He has feeling and He has knowledge, sympathy, and the ability to love and see and think and hear, and speak and desire and grieve and rejoice. And Jesus said about the Holy Spirit, "But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of Me" (John 15:26 KJV).

I have said the Holy Spirit is spirit and not matter. He is personality, He is individuality. He has intelligence, love, memory and can communicate with you. He can love you and therefore can be grieved when you grieve Him. He can be quenched, as any friend can be if you turn on Him, of course He will be hushed into hurt silence, because you have wounded Him. Therefore, we can wound the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is friendly. We try to make Him something else but friendly, but He is friendly. Because He is friendly, He can be grieved. We can grieve Him by ignoring Him, by resisting Him, by doubting Him or by sinning against Him. We grieve Him by refusing to obey Him, bu turning our backs on Him.

Keep in mind, there must be love present before there can be grief. Let me give you an example.

Suppose you had a seventeen-year-old son who began to go bad, who got to that age where he wanted to take things into his own hand. Suppose he joined up with some boy you did not know, some stranger from another part of town, and they got into trouble. You were called down to the police station and there sat your boy, and another boy you had never seen, in handcuffs. You know how you would feel about it. You would be sorry for the other boy, but you did not know him; but with your own boy, your grief would penetrate your heart like a sword. For only love can grieve. If those two boys were sent off to prison, you might pity the boy you did not know, but you would grieve over the boy you did know.

The mother can grieve because she loves. If you do not love, you cannot grieve. Therefore, when the scripture says, "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God," it is telling us that He loves us so much that when we insult Him, He is grieved. When we ignore Him, He is grieve; when we resist Him, He is grieved; when we doubt Him, He is grieved.

In like manner, we can please Him by obeying and believing. When we please Him, He responds to us just as a pleased father responds, just as a pleased mother responds. He will respond to us because He is pleased, because He loves us.

--A.W. Tozer, Mystery of the Holy Spirit,
Excerpts from Chapter 1

Holy Ambition: Paul's and Ours

John Piper @ TCX 2009 Conference

Blessed Is The Man

Blessed is the man
Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
Nor stands in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in its season,
Whose leaf also shall not wither;
And whatever he does shall prosper.

The ungodly are not so,
But are like the chaff which the wind drives away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment,
Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

For the LORD knows the way of the righteous,
But the way of the ungodly shall perish.

--Psalm 1 NKJV

Surrender Your Will to Christ

The deep disease of the human heart is a will broken loose from its center, like a planet which has left its central sun and started to revolved around some strange body from outer space which may have moved in close enough to draw it away. When Satan said, "I will," he broke loose from his normal center, and the disease with which he has infected the human race is the disease of disobedience and revolt. Any adequate scheme of redemption must take into account this revolt and must undertake to restore again the human will to its proper place in the will of God. In accord with this underlying need for the healing of the will, the Holy Spirit, when He effects His gracious invasion of the believing heart, must win that heart to glad and voluntary obedience to the whole will of God.

The cure must be wrought from within; no outward conformity will do. Until the will is sanctified the man is still a rebel just as an outlaw is still an outlaw at heart even though he may be yielding grudging obedience to the sheriff who is taking him to prison.

The Holy Spirit achieves this inward cure by merging the will of the redeemed man with His own. This is not accomplished at one stroke. There must be, it is true, some kind of overall surrender of the will to Christ before any work of grace can be done, but the full mergence of every part of life with the life of God in the Spirit is likely to be a longer process than we in our creature impatience would wish. The most advanced soul may be shocked and chagrined to discover some private area within his life where he had been, unknown to himself, acting as lord and proprietor of that which he thought he had given to God. It is the work of the in-living Spirit to point out these moral discrepancies and correct them. He does not, as is sometimes said, "break" the human will, but He does invade it and bring it gently to a joyous union with the will of God.

To will the will of God is to do more than give unprotesting consent to it; it is rather to choose God's will with positive determination. As the work of God advances, the Christian finds himself free to choose whatever he will, and he gladly chooses the will of God as his highest conceivable good. Such a man has found life's highest goal. He has been placed beyond the little disappointments that plague the rest of men. Whatever happens to him is the will of God for him and that is just what he most ardently desires. But it is only fair to state that this condition is one not reached by many of the busy Christians of our busy times. Until it is reached, however, the Christian's peace cannot be complete. There must be still a certain inward controversy, a sense of spiritual disquiet which poisons our joy and greatly reduces our power.

[Tozer, A.W., God's Pursuit of Man
(formerly published as The Divine Conquest),
Chapter 8, pg.107-109]

The Wonder of It All

Show the wonder of Your great love, You who save by Your right hand those who take refuge in You.

Psalm 17:7

Several years before his death, a remarkable rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, suffered a near-fatal heart attack. His closest male friend was at his bedside. Heschel was so weak he was only able to whisper: "Sam, I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I have lived. I am ready to go. I have seen so many miracles during my lifetime." The old rabbi was exhausted by his effort to speak. After a long pause, he said, "Sam, never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and He gave it to me."


I asked for wonder, and He gave it to me. A Philistine will stand before a Claude Monet painting and pick his nose; a person filled with wonder will stand there fighting back the tears.


We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.

Let us ask God for the gift He gave to this unforgettable rabbi. And let us pray: "Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of Your universe. Delight me to see how Your Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His, to the Father through the features of men's faces. Each day enrapture me with Your marvelous things without number. I do not ask to see the reason for it all; I ask only to share the wonder of it all."

--Brennan Manning

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence