(Last Call will continue the remainder on the Jeremiah Series, as the transcripts are complete. In the meantime, we are pleased to start with Kay Arthur's teachings on Life in the Spirit)
LIFE IN THE SPIRIT SERIES
Does life ever seem ugh to you? I mean no energy, no dynamic, no joy, and you think it.s just same ole, same ole, day in and day out. Well what are you going to do my friend? What we.re going to do is we.re going to look at life in the Spirit. We.re beginning a new series and I believe that it.s going to give you the joy and the purpose that you are looking for.
I.m excited because you and I are going to study life in the Spirit. Now it.s going to be a little bit different than we usually do. Because we usually go through a book of the Bible, chapter by chapter and verse by verse so that you know that and you get a study guide that goes along with it and you mark the text.
Well this time, what we.re going to do is we.re going to be all over the Bible because we want to see what it means to have life in the Spirit. It.s so essential. And when I look around and watch people I think, hey, hey, wait a minute; this is not the life that God intended for you to live as a child of God.
You need to understand about life in the Spirit. Because the fruit of the Spirit, is love and its joy and its peace and its goodness, and its faithfulness, etc. (Galatians 5:22) There.s a nine-fold aspect to the fruit of the Spirit. And when we.re walking in the Spirit, when we.re living in the power of the Holy Spirit, then that fruit is present in our lives.
So let.s take an adventure in the Word of God. And what I want to do is I want to begin by taking you back to Genesis. Some people say Kay, you can.t teach at a conference or anyplace without going from Genesis to Revelation. And that.s what we.re going to do. We.re going to go from Genesis to Revelation because I want you to see what God intended. I want you to understand what the Spirit is all about, who the Spirit really is.
And so I want us to go to Genesis, chapter 1. Now this is what I would suggest that you do. If you.re able, that you would mark the text as we go along. And remember, every time we come to a reference about God, we usually put a triangle because what we.re looking at is the three-fold or the triune part of God. That there is God the Father, that there is God the Spirit, and there is God, the Son.
And so what I do is I take one bottom half, one corner of this triangle and when I take that corner of the triangle and I.m marking the Holy Spirit, I underline Spirit, come up and then put a little cloud around it. And I would suggest that what you do is that you mark the Holy Spirit this way. I do it in purple. You can do it in any color you want and then I color it yellow, because yellow.s my color for God. And remember you and I are studying the Bible inductively. Inductively means hey, we.re going to the Word of God ourselves. We.re not just going to listen to a message. We.re not just going to sit back and relax, but we.re going to interact with the Word of God.
And when you open this Bible what I want you to understand is that these are the actual words of God. This is not an ordinary book. These are not man.s words. This is not man thinking what God thought and then writing it down. But it is a product of God breathing into man the very words that God wanted to use.
So if you have like a King James Version or you have a New American Standard or you have an English Standard Version, you actually have a word for word translation. And it.s word for word, word from the language that it was written in, in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek and then put into English in the closest word possible. So you and I are looking at the very words of God.
When we go to Genesis chapter 1 in verse 1 we see the first mention of the Holy Spirit. Let.s read it. In Genesis chapter 1 it says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.”
The first time that you meet the Holy Spirit you find energy. And this is what I want you to see. Sometimes we get so worn out in life. Life becomes ugh. Life becomes exhausting. But with the Spirit there is energy. Now I.m going to give you time, we.re going to move slow enough so that you can make sure that you.re looking in your Bible, if you.re able to look in your Bible at this point, and that you are actually marking. So you mark the Spirit of God and you find out that the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
And then it says in verse 3, “Then God said, „Let there be light; and there was light..” Listen, when God speaks it happens and you can know this; that as you study this book, that what you are reading has come from God. And God cannot lie. God is truth. Remember Jesus said, the Father and I are one. (John 10:30) And He said I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life and no one comes to the Father, but by Me. (John 14:6)
Now when you look at this, what you.re seeing is you.re seeing the triune God. You.re seeing God the Father, you.re seeing God the Holy Spirit and you.re seeing God the Son. You say, but I don.t see Him here. That.s right. You do not see Him there, but when you go on and you get to Genesis chapter 1, verse 26, it says, “Then God said, „Let Us make man in Our image according to Our likeness and let them, man, male and female, rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth..”
You say, but where is Jesus? It says, “Then God said let Us,” Us, plural. Well, when you go to John chapter 1 this is what He says. And this is very important because the gospel of John was written much later than the other gospels. And it was written for the purpose of establishing very clearly the fact that Jesus was God, that He is One with the Father. But in John chapter 1 in verse 1, it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
And you say but it doesn.t say that it was Jesus. Well let me go on and it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And He was in the beginning with God.” All right, now when you come to John 1:14 it says, “And the Word,” the logos, “became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Now, in John chapter 1, verse 3, it says, “All things came into being by Him,” by the Word, by Jesus. So He was there. And it says, “And apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” So Jesus was there. The Father was there and the Holy Spirit was there.
This is where we meet the Holy Spirit. This is where we meet the triune God in the very first words of the Word of God. „Cause God wants us to understand this principle. And you see it all the way through the scriptures. And we.re going to see that happen. Now, I don.t mark every reference to God and I don.t mark every reference to Jesus because you would be marking too much in your Bible and it would be too confusing to look at. But I always mark every reference to the Holy Spirit.
And the reason that I do that, Beloved, is because the Holy Spirit is not mentioned that much and so you.re not going to mark up your Bible. But I want to tell you something. He.s not mentioned that much, but He is a very vital part. He is like the energy that you see in the Godhead.
And this is what we find in verse 1, that he is moving over the face of the waters. Then we go to Genesis, chapter 1 and verse 26 and what we see is when God said, “Then let Us make man in Our image and in Our likeness,” then we find out that we have the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In verse 27 it says, “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
So when He talks about man, many times in the Word of God, He.s talking about man generically. He.s talking about mankind. That.s what you and I need to understand. Well, as we look at this but I want you to know this: that God intends for you to be in His image. God intends for you to come to know Him in such a way, and to have the Holy Spirit in you so that you are reflecting to others what God is like.
You say, but nobody.s seen God at any time. You.re right, but because of our connection with Him, through the Holy Spirit, then we are to be able to walk so that when people see us they see the fruit the Spirit. They see the love and the joy and the peace and the faithfulness, and the goodness, and the kindness and they see the self-control. (Galatians 5:22) They see the nine-fold fruit of the Spirit in your life and they get to see a glimpse of how God is and how He treats people and how He cares about people and how He handles the situations of life.
So, from here I want us to go to Genesis chapter 2 because I want you to understand very carefully what happens. He.s created man in His image. And man is the vice-regent down here on earth. It goes on to say in verse 28 that God blessed them. He said be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. God made man to be His vice-regent so to speak, down here on earth. God made man to be His CEO, His chief executive officer, if you want to look at it in business terms, down here on earth and to rule underneath Him. But you know what? Something happened. And you say, what happened? Well, we.ll look at it when we come back after this important announcement.
Welcome back my friend. Let.s get on with life in the Spirit. In Genesis chapter 1 we see that God creates everything. We see in verse 26 and 27 that God creates man. And He creates man, male and female. And He createsman in His image. So that if you look at man, you should be able to see God. Now, what happens is in Genesis 1 He gives us the big picture.
And then what He does is He takes a telephoto lens and He zeros in on this creation and He wants us to understand something very important. In Genesis chapter 2, verse 7 it says then God formed man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils, whew, get that, whew, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. If you can imagine in your mind what it would be like if you just had a glove, and you look at that red glove and this is like man. And what God does and this is such a good illustration, but God comes down and here.s this man in His image that He.s forming and all of a sudden God Himself fills man and when He fills man then man has life. If you take the glove and you just lay it down on a table and you look at it, it can.t move. But if you put a hand into it then that glove is able to move. And this is what happens with man. God breathes into man the breath of life and man becomes a living soul. This is what happened on that day.
And when He puts him into that Garden of Eden this is what He tells him and it.s important that you understand this. In Genesis chapter 2, in verse 16: “And the Lord God commanded the man saying, „From any tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of that tree you shall die.”
Now what gives man his life? Well what gives man his life, and you take the glove illustration again, is the fact that God is in man. All right, and He.s saying now look, if you eat of the fruit of that tree then you.re going to die. And I mean you.re going to have no life in you. Why? Listen carefully; God does not live in people that are sinners.
You say, but how do I ever become a saint? You say hey there.s no way I.ll ever become a saint. Oh, you just don.t know your Bible, because there is a way that you become a saint.
Well, what happens in Genesis chapter 3, Eve looks at that tree. The serpent comes into the garden. The serpent speaks to Eve. Eve listens to the serpent instead of listening to God. She takes the fruit of that tree. She eats it. She gives it to Adam and sin enters into the world. Now, in Genesis chapter 3 is where you see that. What happens as a result of that? The minute that they eat of the fruit of that tree, God moves out. There.s no longer the Spirit of life in them. The Holy Spirit is no longer in them. They are not in the image of God. So just imagine this red glove just laying flat because there.s no life in man anymore. Man runs, man hides. God comes to him in the garden and He says where are you?
And this is what I.m asking you, precious one. Where are you today? Are you like an empty glove, just lying around with no life, no energy, no strength, no joy, no nothing? It.s just ugh. And it.s ugh because God.s not in you. Or is it maybe, that God is in you and yet what you have done is you have said, You may be in me, but You.re not going to control me, not in this circumstance because I want to do what I want to do. O beloved, that is dangerous, as we will see.
But let.s move on and let.s see what happened to man. All right, remember man is now without life. He.s dead in his trespasses and sins. So let.s go to Ephesians chapter 2. In Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1 it says, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” You say how did I get dead? I was born living. How did I get dead? Well you.re dead in the sense that the Spirit of God is not in you. You are made in God.s image, but that image is distorted and there.s no life in you. And so therefore, you are dead.
You say well, explain it a little bit more. Let.s go to Romans chapter 5, verse 12 and let me show you something. In Romans 5, verse 12 it says “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world.” Now the one man that sin entered into the world by was Adam, because when Adam and Eve listened to the serpent in the garden and they took of the fruit of the tree, then what happened was when they cohabitated, they produced little sinners, because Genesis chapter 5 says, “Then Adam brought forth a son in his image.” (5:3) Remember Adam was created in God.s image. Think of the glove now, filled with a hand, the hand of God. But when Adam sinned then as a sinner, what did he reproduce? He reproduced just more little sinners. So through one man sin entered into the world.
Now, as result of that, (gasps) death comes. So by “one man sin entered into the world and death by sin,” no life, no life whatsoever. And so death by sin, so then death passed upon all men in that all have sinned. (Romans 5:12) So it could be that it is ugh in your life because you don.t have life. It could be that there is ugh in your life because God has come in, but you.re not really walking in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Now it says that when sin comes into the world then what happens, then you.re dead in your trespasses and sins you walk according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works in the sons of disobedience. And you walk according to your lusts. You walk according to your mind. (Ephesians 2:1-3) And hey, apart from God, that is very dangerous.
Now, I want you to go to the very last mention of the Holy Spirit in the Word of God. And I want you to take you to Revelation chapter 20 in verse 6 it.s talking about those that never received Christ, never have life. And this is what it says: And those that don.t have part in the first resurrection, it says, over these, the second death has got them. In other words they are dead. They are born without life. They are born without God. They never receive God. And because they never receive God, then they stay dead in their trespasses and sins. And it.s called the second death. And you can go back and read about it in Revelation chapter 20. But in Revelation chapter 22, God doesn.t want man to stay that way. God doesn.t want your life to be ugh. God doesn.t want your life to be lifeless. God doesn.t want your life to be without energy and without purpose.
And so what happens? Well, the last mention of the Holy Spirit is in verse 17 of Revelation chapter 22, the very last book of the Bible, the very last chapter of the Bible. And this is what it says: “And the Spirit and the bride say, „Come.. And let the one who hears say, „Come.. And let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes to take the water of life come.” In other words, hey, are you thirsty? Are you longing for an energy, for a purpose? Are you longing for life? Then the Spirit of God is saying to you, “Come.” I want you to know what life in the Spirit is all about
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