The Spirit of God
Resisting the Holy Spirit
Acts 7; Hebrews 10:29; John 16:7-11
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is a massive subject with an extraordinarily large amount of Scripture devoted to it. As early as the 2nd verse of Genesis 1, we find a reference to the Spirit of God as He hovers over the face of the deep. And those references continue all the way to the 17th verse of the closing chapter of the Revelation where we find the Spirit inviting us to come and drink of the water of life.
And yet, in spite of all the material we have available there is a lingering mystery and vagueness regarding the Spirit of God. So for several weeks now we’ve been studying and learning about the Holy Spirit.
We’ve been concerned primarily with the more practical aspects of His ministry. In fact, I’ve subtitled this series “Understanding and Applying the Work of the Holy Spirit”.
That is always my goal when I preach. I want to do more than just share information with you. I want to give you some things that will help you and make you better equipped to know and love and serve God.
For the last few studies we’ve looked at four Scriptural commands we are given as Christians regarding the Holy Spirit. Two of those are positive in instruction, things we should do.
We are commanded to be filled with the Spirit and walk in the Spirit and on the negative side, things we shouldn’t do, we are told not to quench or grieve the Spirit.
Now those four things will help you let the resident Spirit within be in control of your decisions and actions and responses so that what is evidenced in your life is the fruit the Spirit produces.
What about the lost person? What kind of relationship exists between a lost person and the Holy Spirit and what should a person who has never been saved expect in regard to the ministry of the Spirit? Well Scripture has a couple of things to say about that as well.
Today I want us to explore what it means to resist the Holy Spirit. Then next week, we’re going to look at the ultimate conclusion of continually resisting the Spirit and that is blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Resist long enough and you will commit what the Bible identifies as the unpardonable sin. There is only one sin that is unforgivable and it is a sin against the Holy Spirit.
In the seventh chapter of Acts we find a man named Stephen. He is described as a Spirit-filled man of God, and he is speaking before the Sanhedrin and Jewish elders. Notice what he said in
verse 51
Now we need to know what is going on here as the stage is set for this comment.
1. The Setting
Stephen was a brilliant and spiritual man. Acts 6:5 says he was "full of the Holy Spirit and of faith." Verse 8 says he was "full of grace and power." Verse 10 says his opponents "could not resist the wisdom and Spirit with which he spoke." And even after he was arrested, verse 15 says that "his face was like the face of an angel" as he was accused in the court.
Now in spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, the response to him was vicious. The charges against him are given in 6:14: "We have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place, and change the customs which Moses delivered to us."
Earlier in verse 11 he had been accused of speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God. So Stephen is on trial for opposing Moses and his customs and God and his temple.
So in Acts 7:1 the high priest gives Stephen a chance to defend himself, "Is this so?" he asks. And Stephen does a very strange thing. He tells a story—a condensed version of the history of Israel. He starts with Abraham at the beginning (in vv. 1–8).
Then in verses 9–16 he dwells on Joseph and how the Israelites came to Egypt. Then he spends a long time on Moses. That’s in verses 17– 44. Then he closes with a brief reference to Joshua and David and Solomon in verses 45–50.
Finally, he draws his conclusion from this history.
Acts 7:51–53
So what was Stephen's defense? He had been charged with speaking against Moses and the law, and against God and the temple. His defense is that history proves the opposite: it is Israel as a people that have stiffened their neck against God and resisted the Holy Spirit.
They persecuted the prophets of God, and they killed Jesus the Son of God, and now they are about to kill a man "full of faith and the Holy Spirit." They are the ones who need to give an account, not Stephen.
Here were people, primarily Jews, some of whom had seen Jesus and heard Him preach, others who had heard Peter the apostle at Pentecost, others who had heard Stephen and other Spirit-filled men preaching with great power. And in response to that preaching, Stephen says they resisted the Holy Spirit.
Now Stephen describes their resistance as being like that of their fathers. And if you look back through his sermon, he gives them a little history lesson beginning at the time of Abraham.
Verses 2-3
According to verse 4, Abraham makes it half way to the Promised Land and settles in Haran. But God is merciful and does more than merely tell Abraham to go on to the Promised Land; he actually moves him—exerts some special power on Abraham.
So God's mercy begins with choosing Abraham out of all the peoples on the earth to inherit the promised land; and God's patience begins by giving Abraham an extra push to get all the way to the promised land when he had settled half way in Haran.
Then he takes a look at the way Joseph, one of Abraham's great grandsons, comes to Egypt from the promised land.
Verse 9-10
So here is another instance of resisting the will of God. They were jealous that God was speaking to them through Joseph and even implying that they might someday honor Joseph as their superior.
The next illustration is Moses. God raises him up as a deliverer for his oppressed people in Egypt, but when Moses makes his first appearance to help his people, they resist him, as they did Joseph.
verses 26-27
So they reject their deliverer as they did with Joseph and as they will do with Jesus, and he flees into exile in the land of Midian. But there God's patience and mercy move him to send Moses back again.
Verse 34
And in verse 36 we see Moses, the rejected ruler and deliverer, saving the people: "He led them out, having performed wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years."
But again, in spite of all this patience, verses 39–41 say,
Verses 39-41
And for many of them, God's patience came to an end at that point.
Verses 42-43
In other words, since they reject the true worship of God and want idols made with their own hands, God gave them up to demon worship.
But even then God continued to show mercy to all of them.
verse 45
So even after the idolatry in the wilderness, God fought for Israel and gave them the promised land.
Finally, Stephen gets to the point of the temple—the accusation against him. In verse 47, he points out that Solomon built God a house, the temple they prize so dearly and that Jesus said he would destroy and build again in three days. Then he adds in verse 48, "Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with hands."
And right here we get to the heart of Stephen's warning for us in this message. What was the root evil in all this resistance to God's will? Why did they resist the Holy Spirit (v. 51)?
The key is found in a phrase used twice in Stephen’s sermon. It appears in verse 41 and it’s repeated in verse 48.
Notice the little phrase “not made with hands”.
There we discover
2. The Sin
The real problem with Israel was the tendency to depend on what they could accomplish with their own hands rather than trusting God.
They wanted a kind of god and a kind of worship in which they could demonstrate their own power and their own wisdom and their own righteousness and their own morality and their own religious zeal. They got their joy from what they could achieve and not from God.
They wanted to take pride in and credit for the temple rather than trusting the God worshipped in the temple.
The temple in Jerusalem was a symbol of what they could achieve. It was the work of their hands.
And when Jesus came along and said he would destroy the temple and build another in three days "not made with hands" (Mark 14:58), he meant he would destroy this kind of religion.
That’s the point of Stephen’s message. They needed to stop depending on themselves and man-made salvation and trust the salvation provided by Jesus and to not do that was to resist the Holy Spirit.
So what does it mean, more specifically, to resist the Holy Spirit?
To understand that, we need to know what it is the Spirit has come to do in regard to lost people. To sum it up rather simplistically, the Spirit has come to show us Jesus. It is His responsibility to convict us of our sin, help us to realize we are powerless to do anything about it and then point us to Jesus as our only hope.
And as long as we refuse to believe those things about ourselves and Jesus we are resisting the Spirit’s work. In fact, Hebrews 10:29 gives us this very descriptive look at what it means to resist the Spirit.
Hebrews 10:29
So here is a picture of those who deliberately and willfully and repeatedly turn away the Lord and resist the Spirit.
To resist the spirit is to take the precious blood of Jesus and use it as a doormat. It is to take the sacrifice of Christ and treat it unworthily. It is worth no more to you than one of the world’s toys. And notice, it is an insult to the Holy Spirit. The blessed Holy Spirit who calls the sinner and whom he resists is insulted by the Christ-rejecting sinner!
And if you are here today as a person who has never been saved and you sense the Holy Spirit speaking to you and convicting you and urging you toward Christ and you reject His urging and die and go to hell, I want you to know you’ll remember this day when you cleaned your shoes on the blood of Jesus Christ.
You need to know you’ll be in Hell because you dismissed the blood of Christ as a common, unholy thing that could be dismissed and ignored. You will remember that you were called and pleaded with and convicted and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, but you insulted that Spirit and resisted what He was trying to save you from.
We are talking here about the grace of God which is so freely offered to sinners by the Holy Spirit. And sinners who resist and reject that grace of God insult the Holy Spirit who pleads with them.
So what is
3. The Solution
The solution is to yield and respond to the Spirit of God.
John 16:7-11
According to Jesus, one of the purposes of the Spirit’s was to seek and save the lost by convicting or convincing them of certain things.
First the Spirit makes people uncomfortable with their sins. That is called conviction.
When Stephen finished his sermon, according to Acts 7:54, those who heard him were “cut to the heart”. But instead of allowing God to change their heart, they stopped their ears”, ran him out of town and killed him. Such is the power of conviction of sin.
Oswald Chambers said, "Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict of sin, and when the Holy Spirit rouses the conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with men that bothers him, but his relationship with God.
Conviction of sin is the unbearable burden of all of your sin and filthiness before a holy and righteous God. The word in the Greek carries the idea of exposing your sin. When the Spirit of God brings this type of conviction it reveals your total bankruptcy before God. The burden of that sin can only be overcome by realizing God’s blessing of salvation. The verses tell us that the Holy Spirit will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. When does salvation take place? When we stop disagreeing with the truth of our rebellion against God. At this point we no longer have the pride or arrogance to say "I'm good."
I know that is uncomfortable. No one likes to admit they are a sinner. But it is necessary if we will be saved. And as uncomfortable as it is, you ought to thank God for it. It is the evidence of His attention to you. He loves you too much to allow you to continue as you are. And the Holy Spirit has come to see to it that you know that.
Second, Jesus says the Holy Spirit will impress upon you the need for God’s righteousness in your life. That’s why Stephen brought up the tearing down of the temple. Jesus came to destroy anything made by human hands. Any attempt at self-righteousness must be replaced with God’s righteousness.
There is only one way to salvation, and that is Jesus.
You can’t earn it. You aren’t good enough to deserve it. It is only received as a free gift from God.
And thirdly, Jesus said the Spirit will cause you to sense the urgency to profess Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord of your life by making you know there is a time of judgment coming.
One of these days, you are going to answer to God. Have you ever thought about how you will respond when God asks why you resisted the promptings of the Holy Spirit? Why did you refuse to accept His love? Why did you ignore the sacrifice of Christ? How will you answer?
The truth of the matter is when the Holy Spirit comes convicting you of sin, and righteousness and judgment, you will either accept and respond to it or you will resist the Spirit. Those who respond are born again by the grace of God. They are forever sealed by His Spirit and kept by the power of God and will live forever in a beautiful place called heaven prepared by God .
Those who resist the Spirit of God go to Hell. They could have been saved, but they resisted. God's grace offers salvation to all men. All could accept it; many have accepted it; but unfortunately, some do not.
As an example of that, toward the end of Acts 7, appearing almost as an incidental part of the story of Stephen, we are told
Verse 58
This “Saul” we know better as the Apostle Paul. Up to that time, Paul was in that group that was resisting the Holy Spirit. But by the grace of God, Saul met Jesus one day on the road to Damascus and he stopped resisting and he was forever changed.
One Spirit. One message. Two different responses. Some resisted Christ. Saul accepted Christ.
H.A. Ironside served as the pastor of Moody Bible Church in Chicago, Illinois for a number of years in the early 20th century. He told the story of a young woman, who had been brought up in a Christian home and who had often had very serious convictions in regard to the importance of coming to Christ. But instead, she chose to take the way of the world.
Much against the wishes of her godly mother, she insisted on keeping company with a wild, rebellious crowd, who lived only for the passing moment and tried to forget the things of eternity. Again and again she was pleaded with to turn to Christ, but she persistently refused to heed the admonitions addressed to her.
Finally, she was taken with a very serious illness. All that medical science could do for her was done in order to bring about her recovery, but it soon became evident that the case was hopeless and death was staring her in the face. Still she was hard and stubborn when urged to turn to God in repentance.
One night she awoke suddenly out of a sound sleep, a frightened look in her eyes, and asked excitedly, "Mother, what is Ezekiel 7:8 and 9?" Her mother said, "What do you mean, my dear?" She replied that she had had a most vivid dream. She thought there was a Presence in the room, who very solemnly said to her, "Read Ezekiel 7:8-9."
Not recalling the verses in question, the mother reached for a Bible. As she opened it, her heart sank as she saw the words, but she read them aloud to the dying girl:
"Now I will shortly pour out my fury upon thee, and accomplish mine anger upon thee: and I will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense thee for all thine abominations. And mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity: I will recompense thee according to thy ways and thine abominations that are in the midst of thee; and ye shall know that I am the Lord that smiteth."
The young lady, with a look of horror on her face, sank back on the pillow, and in a few moments she was in hell for eternity because she resisted the Holy Spirit.
So what will you do? Will you accept or resist?
