“Understanding the Holy Spirit part 6”

(How to hear from the Holy Spirit part 4)

August 7th, 2005.  Pastor Matt

Previous weeks:

-         H.S. speaks through

o       Absence/ presence of peace

o       Our conscience

o       The Word of God

This Week:

The Holy Spirit uses Wisdom to speak to us

Ephesians 4:17-23. 

-         Paul is reminding his Christian audience about how they are to live

-         As new Christians we are not live as we did before we came to believe in Jesus

-         We are to live a new life,

o       a life where we strive to be more like Jesus,

o       where we strive to live a life of righteousness and holiness

-         It is the Holy Spirit inside us who wants to guide us into this kind of life

Ephesians 5:25-32

-         These verses contain some simple rules Paul gives the Christians to live by

(32)(KJV)  And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. 

Ephesians 5:1-7. 

-         these are more rules for Christian living

Ephesians 5:8-11a. 

-         this is the point of why we are here

o       we are to find out what the Lord wants us to do and do it

Sometimes we have rules for Christian living right in front of us. 

They are literally in black and white and Red (in the Bible)

But what do you do when you are faced with an issue that is not clearly in the Bible?

What do we do when we have peace, our conscience is not convicting us one way or the other, and the Word of God does not spell it out for us?

We have to ask ourselves a couple of questions:

What is the Wise thing for me to do?

Ephesians 5:15-18.  

-         We are not to be unwise

-         Anyone want to be known as the guy who has no wisdom?

-         We are not to be foolish

We are to be wise.  What does it mean to be wise?  What is wisdom?

1. Wisdom is Being careful

(15)“Be very careful”

“having traced the course of all things accurately” ^[1]

-         you have looked at all the options

-         you have all the facts

-         you have searched the Scriptures and found everything that remotely has anything to do with what you are trying to understand

o       once you have all the facts, you find the best middle ground

§        you triangulate more than one verse to arrive at an answer

§        if you need one more factor, ask yourself “what is the better thing to do?”

·        both choices may be ok, but one is better

o       let’s take the high road

o       this is not just a gutt feeling

o       this is more of a research feeling

Important thing to note:

This is why there are many different viewpoints from the Bible. 

God told someone what was the best thing for them to do but they took it a step further and applied it to everyone around them, even the entire world .

We are not to judge and we are not to apply what God told us to do to others. 

We do what He tells us to do and we let God be the one to tell them what to do.