How Can an Individual Grieve The Holy Spirit?

In this part of the sermon: An extended illustration contrasts the inability of a statue (Abraham Lincoln Memorial) to feel grief with the deep emotional pain a living person (a wife whose birthday is…

A man visits the Lincoln Memorial, where a vandal kicks and spits on the statue without causing it pain. Later, the same man forgets his wife's birthday, causing her deep grief. This illustrates the difference between an inanimate object and a living, feeling being, applying it to the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Now I want to have you exercise your imagination this morning, and imagine with me that you, as a married man with your wife, are visiting our nation's capital, that place called Washington, D.C. And in the course of spending a couple of days touring the various sites in Washington, D.C., you presently find yourself standing before that larger-than-life figure of old Abraham Lincoln, sitting very peacefully in his large, chair at that very popular tourist attraction, the massive and impressive Lincoln Memorial. And while you're standing there with your wife and other tourists, looking up...

4:04 - 5:20 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin reiterates the church's commitment to maintaining an ungrieved Holy Spirit, emphasizing that the Spirit is a living, divine being capable of grief, as mandated by Ephesians…

A note to a camp counselor warns against aggravating a son's allergies. The counselor needs to know *how* the allergies are aggravated to obey the command. This illustrates that knowing *how* the Spirit is grieved is essential to obeying the command not to grieve Him.

And in opening up the crucial text, we had but two headings, the explicit command, and we considered it together, both its meaning and motivation, and then the implicit concern. There is an implicit concern in the giving of that command, and that implicit concern is opened up in Isaiah 63.10 and the preceding and the following context of that text where we read, And they vexed his Holy Spirit. Now this morning we move on from the crucial text which mandates this determination to take up an important question which is, How is the Holy Spirit grieved? You may send your son or daughter off to cam...

10:48 - 12:08 Read in full sermon

The point: If you are indulging things in heart and life offensive to the Spirit's holiness, you are grieving Him.

Compares the humiliation of the Holy Spirit dwelling in believers' hearts, in close proximity to sin, to the humiliation of Christ, but notes the Spirit's humiliation is ongoing. This emphasizes the depth of the Spirit's love and the gravity of grieving Him.

He stooped to become a little speck of life in Mary's womb, to go through the humiliation of being dependent on an umbilical cord for nine months, to go through the humiliation of being expelled into the world like any other child, dependent upon his mother's breast, then all the indignities that he suffered throughout life and on to his death. But you see, his humiliation is bounded by those thirty years. And once he ascended to the right hand of the Father, though he took back with him the humanity that he assumed in Mary's womb, it was glorified humanity, not humanity in humiliation, not hu...

26:15 - 27:39 Read in full sermon

The point: Make it part of your specific preparation for every day, and especially every Lord's Day, to ask God to search you and show you if you are grieving the Spirit.

If 100 individuals in a church get laryngitis, it will corporately affect the praise of the whole congregation. This illustrates how individual grieving of the Spirit impacts the corporate spiritual climate of the church.

of our life and ministry and now you've spent 45 minutes telling us how we grieve the Holy Spirit individually what does that have to do with grieving him in our church life well I want to conclude by answering that question it's a mathematical issue and a theological issue most of you learned this little axiom in a math course somewhere along the line the whole is the sum of all of its what parts the whole is the sum of all of its parts now suppose this next week for some strange unknown reason next Saturday in a hundred different homes throughout the areas where we live a hundred different f...

49:54 - 51:23 Read in full sermon