190: Buckling the Belt: Lesson 3 following the Spirit's lead

Recorded July 7, 2023 Buckling the Belt of Truth, lesson 3

THEME:  following the SPIRIT’s lead

I will not read all the verse numbers, nor will I always cite which translation I am quoting from. If I don’t say which translation, it is either NLT or GNT. The complete information is found in the episode notes.

One of the mistakes I made in trying to find victory over my evil desires was thinking that the spiritual reality of my death and resurrection with Christ was going to be the key that would give me total victory over sin. It doesn’t work that way. But the reality I find is that the Holy Spirit empowers all the truth about our unity with Christ. The Spirit is actually the Answer to the prayers we made based on the first two lessons for bucking the belt of truth.

He is

• our rescuer from evil desires (our ‘flesh’) which is bent on taking us to spiritual death.
• He is the power for transformation,
• the creator of a new creation,
• the motivator of our hearts.

But realizing the role of the Holy Spirit is not like finding a key to anything. He is a person. It would be insulting to His personhood for me to give you steps for using or controlling God’s Spirit. You must get to know Him. 

The personhood of the Holy Spirit actually made it difficult for me to write this lesson. Let me give an example: In my first draft I wrote the next heading as “How to get the Spirit.” How insulting that must be to Him! And I beg his pardon. He is not a thing we obtain. People do slip sometimes and talk about marriage that way, like, “Where did he get that wife?” or like insensitive advice to a woman, “You need to get a husband.”

Gale and I have built our relationship over 51 years, over many tough times, and through the crucible of taking our family to live in a different culture. Yet I still need to keep a close eye on maintaining my relationship with Gale. Now, the tricky thing is, if I were able to go back in time to 1972 to give myself advice, I would not be able to articulate a set of steps for how to keep Gale happy. Living with the Spirit is like that. I can’t tell you very much about how to know Him, while paradoxically, I know He has been my friend. So that next heading is:

How do we start a relationship with the Spirit? The answer is incredibly simple.

John 7:37-39 GNT

On the last and most important day of the festival Jesus stood up and said in a loud voice, “Whoever is thirsty should come to me, and whoever believes in me should drink. As the scripture says, ‘Streams of life-giving water will pour out from his side.’” Jesus said this about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were going to receive. At that time the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not been raised to glory.

This agrees with Rev. 22:17 GNT

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come!” Everyone who hears this must also say, “Come!” Come, whoever is thirsty; accept the water of life as a gift, whoever wants it.

So the simple answer to how we start a relationship with Him is to come to Him in prayer and ask Him to start his work in your heart. I’ll give pointers about how to pray at the end of this lesson.

Cooperate with the Spirit:

We must understand that God’s Spirit is the Author of Scripture. Therefore, we can know that He wants to do his work in us in a way that matches what we find in Scripture. The memorizable verses to support this are 2 Peter 1:20‭-‬21 (NLT):

Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.

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