Today I want to speak on the subject “The gravity, the seriousness, of grieving the Holy Spirit.” Now in order to understand the seriousness of grieving the Holy Spirit, I must remind you of the simple place the Holy Spirit plays in your life if you are a Christian. Remember this. Two thousand years ago God revealed Himself to humankind in the most personal way. He did that by sending Jesus of Nazareth to this planet to live 33 years. After 33 years had passed Jesus was crucified on a cross. But as you see from our cross, He did not remain on that cross. He was buried in a grave; he arose from that grave and 30 days later in that body – that resurrection body – He ascended into heaven and He sits at the right hand of God and will sit there until He comes back to planet earth at the end of the Great Tribulation to set up His thousand-year reign in Jerusalem. He will come, Zechariah says, to the Mount of Olives.
Jesus is absent in His body from this world, but He promised the disciples that when He went to heaven in His body that He would come without His body to planet earth, and He did that on the Day of Pentecost. God without body came into the hearts of His people, that is to say, God came in the person of the Holy Spirit.
So the only knowledge you and I have of Jesus Christ today is through the Holy Spirit. The work of God in my life and your life is carried on by the Holy Spirit who is the ambassador, the representative, the alter ego, literally the other self, of Jesus.
Now you can logically see that you need to be in a right relationship with the Holy Spirit. You need to obey Him, and you need to be sensitive, and you don’t need to tolerate anything in your life which would short-circuit His love, or place Him in a position that all He can do is something negative on the inside of you. That is, to make you miserable, and convict you rather than releasing His love, power, and grace in your life.
So we are dealing with something very serious in the Christian life. Are you grieving the only source of life, the only teacher, the only life you have? Are you grieving Him until He cannot work in your lives except negatively?
Now I need to raise several questions on this very important Biblical theme:
What does it mean to grieve the Holy Spirit?
This word “grieve” is a very, very tender love word. You can only love or grieve someone who loves you. The Holy Spirit loves us so much that we can grieve Him. And to grieve Him means to cause Him deep sorrow, hurt, and pain. I illustrate it with the experience of us parents.
If your child does something wrong, contrary to his or her welfare, you are not just disappointed or vexed, you are grieved. You are so deeply hurt that you cannot even express it. When your child sins against that which you know is right, and goes in the direction that is going to hurt him or her you are deeply grieved in your heart – well, that is the way it is for the Holy Spirit, when you as a Christian do anything that hurts Him and causes Him sorrow and causes Him pain, He too is deeply grieved. That leads to the second question:
What does this show us about this wonderful person called the Holy Spirit?
- It shows us that He is a person. You see, the Holy Spirit is not an “it,” not a “thing,” not a “force” primarily. You cannot grieve an “it,” a “force,” or a “thing.” He is a real person. God the Holy Spirit lives where you live. Don’t ever think of Him as simply being a “force,” but a person who is present.
- He is a person and He is forever present with you. Jesus says in John 14:16 that He will abide with you forever. He cannot leave you. If He were to leave you, that would mean you could lose your salvation and you become an Armenian in theology and follow the Pentecostal and the Church of Christ which is not biblical doctrine. He is in you . He is present.
- He has deep passion. There are some people in our lives who are very sensitive to the Holy Spirit. But the most sensitive person is actually insensitive when compared to the Holy Spirit’s sensitivity. He is the most tender, precious, loving personality in this entire world. So much so that the way you talk on the telephone can grieve Him, and cause you problems.
I shall never forget when God showed me the way I talk could grieve the blessed Holy Spirit. He is a person –a person who lives in you. He is present forever and He is filled with compassion which cannot be described. He loves you so much, and James 4:5 says that He hovers over us jealously. Oh, the love of the Holy Spirit for us today. Don’t cause Him sorrow and pain.
- What causes the Holy Spirit sorrow and pain?
Any sinful act or any sinful attitude – what we call plain old sin causes Him sorrow and hurt and pain. In the satellite verses around our text we have some of the major sins that we ought to avoid like we would a plague.
Ephesians 4:25 indicates that any form of lying, exaggeration, or misrepresentation will greatly grieve the Holy Spirit. You’d better be careful how you talk. If you tell a half truth or you color the truth, the Holy Spirit is grieved.
In Ephesians 4:28 we read that we grieve the Holy Spirit when we are not willing to work, and when we take from others, and when we steal. Who is the greatest in the universe? God. So the greatest fault in the world is to steal from God, to steal your time from God or to steal His tithe. That is exactly what the Bible calls it – robbery. I don’t believe people who love God want to do this. I ask you not to do this for the damage it will do to your soul and your spiritual life. Unpaid debts without facing the responsibility are stealing. If you have some unpaid debts that you can’t pay, you ought to get in touch with your creditor. Don’t let a debt be outstanding without dealing with your creditor in integrity. The Holy Spirit is holy and honest and He doesn’t expect us to deal like the world.
Ephesians 4:29 says “Let no filthy conversation proceed out of your mouth,” not one word. Everything you and I say is heard by the Holy Spirit. Have you said something this week that grieved Him? I’m not just talking about curse words. The worse form of this with Christians is gossiping, backbiting and criticism. Do you want to be powerless the rest of your life and never understand the Bible, and never enjoy prayer, and never be able to sing with joy? Well, you just be irresponsible in how you use your tongue and say any and everything that without thinking in your communication with others and this is exactly what will happen.
Oh, the sadness that has come to my heart as a pastor as I have seen people so shallow in the way they use their tongues. If the Holy Spirit was in them, He was so grieved until they had no power with Him whatsoever. That’s the reason we ought to watch what we say.
In Ephesians 4:31 he says, “Don’t let any bitterness, don’t let any anger, don’t let any evil speaking be in you.” Then he keeps on in 5:4, “Don’t joke about sex.” Wonder why God put that in there? That was written 2000 years ago. We live in a day that all the time in offices and everywhere we go people want to be smart and nice and they tell us sexual jokes. A lot of them call themselves Christians. That is a very serious sin against the Holy Spirit. Paul says thank God for the gift of sex; don’t joke about it.
On and on we could go with sins like that, but listen, that might not be what your problem is today. Did you know that a backslidden church member will grieve the Holy Spirit? Some of you are backslidden. You don’t really pray or read your Bible. You are not really in the battle for God. You go to church on Sunday morning, but you are really not living obediently for God. Did you know that is one of the greatest grief’s in the world to the Holy Spirit? See Amos 6:1. Closely related to this hardness of the heart, Mark 3:5 says, Jesus was angry and grieved when He saw the hardness of the heart of the Pharisees.
I know of nothing that hurts me more than to see you have a hard heart. What is a hard heart? It’s just to go to church and sit there, not really letting the Word of God do its work in your heart until it just becomes a mechanical thing, and you just sit there with your arms folded and say, “Pastor, I’ll give you and the choir about 20 or 25 minutes to entertain me and don’t run overtime, then I am going home. I’ll never go to the altar, and I’ll never repent.” Oh, that’s one of the most awful states you can come to in your life! The greatest tragedy of our time is the people who go to church at 11:00 on Sunday morning and harden their hearts. Oh, how grieved the Holy Spirit is if you harden your hearts against the Word of God, and refuse to come to the altar in repentance and brokenness. Brokenness is what we need in the face of God, not haughtiness.
A backslidden church grieves the heart of the Holy Spirit as much as anything in the world, just a backslidden church. The hardest word Jesus ever spoke was not to the church engaged in false doctrine and immorality; the hardest word that Jesus ever spoke to a church was to a luke-warm church that didn’t care and wasn’t burdened about a lost world and was just playing church. See Revelation 3:16 – This is utterly serious and today if you are luke-warm, you need to repent. You are grieving the Holy Spirit.
You grieve the Holy Spirit as an unrepentant sinner. If you stand back and hear the voice of God and you hear the appeal of the Lord in your heart and you say, “No, no, no.” You will come to the time that you won’t hear His voice. I’m warning you. We say we can be saved any time. We said that – the Bible didn’t say that. You cannot be saved anytime. And you can hear the Word of God so long until you can’t hear it and you won’t hear it.
If you are lost this morning and the Holy Spirit is speaking to your heart, you had better do something about it. Let me illustrate it like this. Suppose you had never heard an alarm clock in your life. It went off at 5:00 A.M. If you had never heard one, it would scare you half to death. It went off the next morning; it would have an impact. It would go off maybe several weeks and have an impact, but suppose it kept going off, and off. The time will come when you will not even hear the alarm clock and will unconsciously close it down. That’s what is going to happen to the Holy Spirit in your life if you continue to resist Him when you need to come to Jesus. There may not be another time! “He that be often reproved and hardens his neck shall suddenly be destroyed and that without remedy.” That’s what I call when the lights go out on the road to hell. The lights go out on the road to hell when you have said “no” to the Holy Spirit so long that He takes His flight.
What happens when we grieve the Holy Spirit?
When we grieve the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself is made very, very sad. But your spirit suffers the same experience.
Why are people so sad? Are you sad today, and you call yourself a Christian? I would say that in 90% of the cases it’s because you are grieving the Holy Spirit. If you grieve the Holy Spirit and make Him sad, it would be very difficult for you to have any joy. Indeed, many are depressed today because the Holy Spirit on the inside of them is depressed and they simply are reflecting a hurt Holy Spirit. And when you are grieving the Holy Spirit, you are not going to pray much. You may mechanically pray, but you are not really going to pray much. The Bible will be basically closed to you. You will lose your love for the Word of God. I’ll tell you something else. You will be cantankerous and mean in your spirit as a rule. You will have a critical eye. You will try to pick apart the vision and things in the church. You will try to justify yourself because you know you are not right. So you are taking it out on others. When a person is not right with God, they are trying to find a scapegoat in their spiritual authority or what their church is doing. And one of the greatest expressions is just plain old rebellion:
“I’m not right with God.”
“No one has the right to tell me what to do.”
“I don’t believe in this.”
“I’ll do what I want to do.”
That’s a real sign of grieving the Holy Spirit.
But I want to tell you the sad thing. When there is enough grieving of the Holy Spirit in a church, there is no real evangelism. It doesn’t matter who the preacher is. It doesn’t matter how the choir sings. Why? Because you are the channel of the Holy Spirit. See John 16:8-11. The Holy Spirit doesn’t just come down here directly. We are the channels of the Holy Spirit to a lost world. If this congregation is not a channel of the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit does not convict a lost world. Jesus said to the disciples in John 16:8, “When the Holy Spirit is come to you (the disciples), he will convict the world.” Where people are saved in a Baptist church, it is because people are open to the Holy Spirit and He is moving in the congregation. It’s not the preaching basically. It’s the people that’s conduits of the Holy Spirit moving, convicting. And assuming everyone here this morning is saved, and we are not grieving the Holy Spirit, I could not even finish a sermon if a lost person was here who would not be so convicted, we couldn’t keep them off of the altar.
What are we to do? I hope we can be honest. We need to be honest, friend. If you are grieving the Holy Spirit, and you are a child of God, I don’t think you want to continue to grieve Him because you are killing yourself. I would remind you that the Holy Spirit is not going to abandon you, and He is not going to remove Himself from you. What is He going to do? He is going to stay right there in you to make you miserable until you get right. You are not going to get away with it.
If you can continue to disobey and you can continue to defy the Holy Spirit, you are not saved in the first place. You don’t have the Holy Spirit. If you are sinning, by your tongue, by your attitude, by anything you are doing, and you are not miserable, the Holy Spirit is not there. And you know the reason He does this? To bring us back to God and to bring us to brokenness.
The Bible is full of it. In Psalm 32 David tells us that He was silent for a solid year. He didn’t admit his sin. And he said when he was silent and didn’t admit his sin, he said, “I was just filled with pain. I was sick all over. My bruises – everything about me was sick.”
I have never seen so many hurting people today. I spend 90% of my time with hurting people. Sometimes it is because a child has done wrong and sometimes it’s because a mate has gone the way of Satan, but most people today are hurting because they are not right with God. That’s the reason we have so many hurts. Are you right with God today? That will heal more people than anything in this world. Until we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives to fill us with love and power, there will be hurt.
Will God forgive? He will if we admit the sin and turn from it, and He will cleanse us, absolutely! The Holy Spirit who has come to make Jesus real will start His wonderful work, and you will feel like you have been born again, again.
Have you been grieving the Holy Spirit? If so, I beseech you because of the love which He has, not to do it. And pride is one of the greatest things and spiritual pride is the greatest enemy to God in the church.
What is grieving the Holy Spirit in your life? Would you admit it today as sin? Would you with repentant heart bring it to the cross? God will forgive you and you will leave this place a new person today.