-Transcript-
00:36 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the cafe.
00:40 Thank you for being here. Hope you’re having a wonderful day. Today we are discussing a very important spiritual truth that Paul points out in 1st Thessalonians 5. And before we get to that, I’ll just recap here.
00:54 We’re in a four-part message of some advice that Paul gives out. Some very, very profound advice. A lot of these verses, as I’ve mentioned previously, you’ll see on plaques.
01:05 You’ll see quoted often. You’ll see it in a greeting card. And it was just kind of the end of 1 Thessalonians 5. Paul just mentions, hey, here are some things that you should do.
01:16 Basically, number one, rejoice evermore.Always rejoicing even in affliction, temptation, victory. Rejoicing evermore.
01:23 Secondly, praying without ceasing. Praying at all times. Having that routine, that repetition, and staying repentant before God so our prayers are heard.
01:32 Thirdly, ineverything giving thanks. We spoke about the idea of giving thanks because it’s the Lord’s will concerning us in Christ Jesus. And because no matter where we are or a lot in life, no matter what our lot in life is, he is worthy to be praised.
01:52 And He is wonderful and He’s fearful. And He must increase and we must decrease. And all of this plays into the idea of God deserves our praise.
02:04 And it kind of goes hand-in-hand with praying without ceasing is praising Him without ceasing and thanking Him without ceasing. And finally here, today we’re talking about quench not the spirit. Quench not the spirit, which is a wonderful piece of advice that Paul gives here.
02:17 And very important, quench not the spirit. That’s 1 Thessalonians 5:19. Now you may wonder what is it to quench the spirit? Well, I always think, when I hear this verse spoken or I read it, I always think of church. And you’re in a church, maybe you go to a small church or a medium church.
02:35 I don’t even know what that means anymore. But you know, you go to a church and there’s people there, right? And the Lord’s convicting you. You know, the song is being sung or someone’s testifying or the preaching is going on.
02:47 The Lord’s convicting you to go up to the altar, give it to the Lord, and you don’t want so-and-so to look at you, and you don’t want this other person to see you, or you know, that’s quenching the spirit when you don’t go to the altar in that time. Now, of course, there may be practical reasons. I know some churches, they don’t even want you to.
03:03 They have ushers that’ll sit you back down. I went to an old-style, old-timey church for many years, and now I try to beg the congregation to get to our little altar, which is a bench essentially. And so I’d probably fall over if somebody did one of these days, because it’s a small group and everybody knows each other.
03:22 But the Bible tells us don’t quench the spirit. Quench not the spirit. And that’s what it makes me think of.
03:27 In fact, that’s what I would repeat to myself if I felt the Lord tugging on my heart as I sat in that service before the Lord had called me to preach. And I’d go up there and say, I can’t quench the spirit. The Bible says don’t quench the spirit.
03:40 Another way would be maybe the Lord’s convicting you to do something. Maybe witness to someone or offer counsel to someone. And you know what that’s like, that heavy hand of the Lord upon you.
03:52 You don’t want to quench the spirit. And so Paul instructs the church at Thessalonica not to quench the spirit, and he’s telling us that here today through the Holy Spirit. Do not quench the spirit.
04:00 So how do we do that? I’ve got a couple of ideas of how we quench the spirit, and we need to be aware of this. This needs to be on our radar. You know, they send out a bulletin, especially in police work and so forth.
04:14 My brother-in-law’s a state trooper. He’ll get a, you know, a ding on his walkie-talkie. Oh, an all-points bulletin.
04:20 Look out for this. Look out for that. You know, we as Christians, we need a bulletin here sometimes to let us know, hey, let’s not quench the spirit.
04:29 Look out for it. Because it can happen if we’re not careful. Let me say it like this.
04:33 If you’re on autopilot, if you’re living in this world on autopilot, you absolutely can quench the spirit because this world is so sinful and wicked. And the example I’ve given before in preaching to the congregation is the idea of if you were to wade in the water of the ocean, you just wade, and so you’re not doing anything. You’re just neutral.
04:51 You’re floating. Well, what happens? You end up drifting with the tide. Our youngest son, CJ, was wading a little bit in the water.
05:01 He can’t really swim, but he was in the water. And that young man, he drifted over to the side, over to the side. And when he came out of the water, he had lost his parents.
05:10 And we had eyes on him, but he just about freaked out as he ran up the beach there towards where he thought his parents were, and they weren’t there because that tide had brought him away. The tide of this world, the wickedness of this world is unbelievable. And if you just live in this world, and you don’t seek the Lord, and you don’t call out to God, and you don’t repent of your sins regularly, and if you aren’t in His Word daily, you’re going to be quenching the Spirit, not even knowing it.
05:37 And we see that here in life. Number one, sin grieves the Holy Spirit. And what I described is a world full of sin, Ephesians 4:30, and grieve not the Holy Spirit, whereby you’re sealed unto the day of redemption.
05:51 And so the Holy Spirit seals us unto the day of redemption. The idea is God is so loving to us, Jesus Christ said, look, I’m gonna give you, I can’t be with everybody in person right now because I’m going up to heaven, I’m gonna be at the right hand of the Father, but I’m gonna send one that is with you, and you’ll be glad I did. And this one’s called the Comforter, and that’s the Holy Spirit.
06:14 And when we accept Christ as Savior, we get the Holy Spirit living within us. You know, you hear a good gospel song on the radio, and you’re moved to tears, that’s the Holy Spirit. Again, you’re convicted to witness to somebody, or to repent to the Lord, or to do something, or not to do something, that’s the Holy Spirit.
06:29 We’re given the Comforter, and I’m so thankful for the Comforter. In the early days of the Lord calling me to plant a church, we didn’t know anybody in the town we went to, not a single soul. We knocked on doors and did not have a wonderful reception, imagine that, went knocked on doors, and people didn’t really want to come to church.
06:46 Well, or they didn’t, they already had a church, I don’t know. But either way, it was tough. And oh, how that Holy Spirit would comfort me, I would preach my heart out, and I’d be all sweaty and walking out of that chapel, and just seeing a few people that were leaving and so forth, and just shaking my head, thinking, what am I doing? And oh, how that Holy Spirit would just come upon me, just give me peace, and comfort, and encouragement, and I can’t describe it other than to say that’s the Holy Spirit.
07:10 And I can say that when we sin, we grieve the Holy Spirit. When we sin, we grieve the Holy Spirit. And I guess the question I have for you today is, if you don’t fully understand what sin is, how can you know when you’re sinning and when you’re not? That is something to think about.
07:24 You know, my job as a preacher, which is my main occupation in my mind as I wake up each day, that’s what God called me to do, and I’m certain of it more so than anything else. My job is to study God’s Word. And so by virtue of my job, I’ll study God’s Word extensively and say, oh, I didn’t know that was a sin.
07:43 Oh, look at this sin. Oh, you know, that’s a sin too. And all of a sudden, I’m realizing sin is a broad brush here.
07:49 It’s painting a broad picture. Well, if the preacher knows it, how can you know it? Again, it’s not your job to study the Word. Well, maybe it may be.
07:57 Maybe you’re in the ministry. But if not, I urge you to study the Word, especially when it comes to some of the sins that are not as obvious. An obvious sin would be like, thou shalt not murder or thou shalt not steal.
08:09 Okay, you’re not, maybe you’re not murdering anybody today. Maybe you’re not a thief. But how about thou shalt not covet? That’s a really hard one.
08:16 Try walking around the mall without coveting or a car dealership or anywhere without coveting. It’s so easy to fall into this trap of wanting something that you don’t have, that God didn’t give you. Now, He may give it to you later.
08:28 But if he didn’t give it to you now, there should be no desire for it. You shouldn’t be making a place in your heart for that thing, because now you’re creating an idol. And coveting, you know, Paul wrote that he didn’t understand sin or he didn’t realize he was a sinner until he understood what coveting was.
08:42 It’s a very serious offense. And that will quench the spirit. If you are constantly coveting, if you’re constantly saying, I could be happy, but I’m not only if I had this thing, I would be, then that’s a sin.
08:53 And that’s going to grieve the Holy Spirit, that’s going to quench the spirit. Another one would be false witness, the idea of gossiping. You know, again, if you use the King James, like I do it, you read false witness, backbiting, these other things.
09:11 It doesn’t exactly speak in the modern vernacular, the modern term, but the modern term is gossip and gossip is a sin. And so if you are prone to gossip, or to spend time with people that gossip, you are grieving the Holy Spirit, you are living in sin. And again, these are things that have taken me years to learn in the Bible as I’ve understood.
09:26 And so some things I understood, like you would just get that feeling again, maybe the Holy Spirit convicting you if you were in church or you’re around people, and they started to gossip, you say something’s not right about this. But when you read the word, God is completely against it. You know, if you have something that you need to say about somebody, you need them present.
09:41 Amen, you need to go ahead and tell them and if you don’t want to tell them and you can’t, you should not gossip at all. It’s a sin. So sin grieves the Holy Spirit.
09:51 And these sins, these lesser known sins, are an absolute abomination to God. How about culturally appropriate sins? You know, the culture says it’s totally fine to be homosexual. The Bible says it’s an abomination to God.
10:03 The Bible also says that there’s no variableness or turning with God. So if God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah over their great grievous sin, if God believes that homosexuality is an abomination, that the effeminate will not be in heaven, amen, that that is a sin, if God believes that and if God does not change, then if you are accepting of that, you’re also grieving the Holy Spirit. So realize that sin will grieve the Holy Spirit and we’re not to quench the Spirit.
10:30 Another way that we see the Holy Spirit grieved is lack of faith. Lack of faith leads to doubt and mistrust, and that also will grieve the Holy Spirit. And when He was come into His own country, this is Jesus, He taught them in their synagogue in so much that they were astonished and said, whence hath this man, this wisdom, these mighty works? Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is this is not His mother called Mary and His brethren, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas and His sisters? Are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? And they were offended in Him.
11:03 But Jesus said unto him, a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house. And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief. That’s Matthew 13:54-58.
11:17 And so we see their unbelief, their lack of belief in Jesus, led to Him not doing mighty works there. And our lack of faith and our lack of trust in the Lord and the promises He’s given us in His word, our lack of faith, what keeps you from reading the Bible? What keeps you from praying? Guess what? Lack of faith. If you believed it would work, if you believed in God, that his mighty power, it wouldn’t be a low priority for you.
11:41 It would be a very high priority for you. Amen. You believe that they’re gonna write you a check when you go to work, right? You believe you’re gonna go to school and learn something, so you go.
11:50 Amen. But you don’t go to God’s word. That’s a lack of faith.
11:56 And Jesus cannot work in that way. He will not work in that way. He did not perform many miracles because of their lack of faith, Matthew 13 tells us.
12:00 And we see that in our lives today, that we grieve the Holy Spirit when we don’t have faith. Finally, looking to not offend or pride, as I mentioned, not wanting to get up to go to the altar, having that pride, not wanting everyone looking at you like, what’s wrong with this person? Proverbs16:5, everyone that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord, though a hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished. And so we see in this great verse in Proverbs, that even though people will be proud and boastful in masses, and they’ll even come together and join hands, like look at us, we’re so proud, and our movement is great, and so on and so forth, they will not go unpunished.
12:36 Pride is an abomination to God. Again, everything I’ve mentioned is sin. Pride is sin, as well as lack of faith, as well as sin in general.
12:46 All of these things lead to the grieving of the Holy Spirit. And so we are not to quench the Spirit. The main culprit of quenching the Spirit is sin, specifically sins that we may not fully understand are sins, or those sins that aren’t mentioned a lot, as well as pride and lack of faith.
13:04 These are the things that quench the Spirit, and we are not to quench the Spirit. So what do we do? We humble ourselves before God. Amen.
13:12 We repent before God. We get right with God. We ask Him to increase, and we decrease.
13:19 We live for Him without pride, in humility, in meekness, the idea of power under control. We live in meekness and humility, and we go to the Lord every day in prayer. We stay repentant before Him.
13:30 We believe and have faith. We believe in what God is calling us to do. We believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, and then we will not grieve that Holy Spirit.
13:40 And we will have a wonderful relationship with God, and a closeness with God that’s without compare. And that is why Paul tells us to not quench the Spirit, so that we can be closer to God and be used by God. And what a great way to live this life.
13:56 And Paul gives us the prescription here in 1 Thessalonians 5. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your time. Take care, and God bless.