Amen. I was down this weekend at Newport Beach speaking at the Mayors' Breakfast held in Balboa Bay Club, a lavish setting with yachts and pleasure boats anchored right outside the window. In this bewildering world, this perplexing age in which we live, don't you sometimes almost physically hunger for someone, somewhere, somehow, who can tell us the truth? We urge the seeking of the Holy Spirit. It is rather startling to realize that the work of the Incarnate Christ, that is, Jesus Christ of Nazareth working and walking among men, was, at its end, apparently a total and complete failure. He uses here a verb in the present tense which means "he who is continually believing in me." Or, more accurately, another is living his life in him. I strengthen my relationship with the Holy Spirit by consciously choosing to include Him in every conversation, every interaction, as often as possible. Notice what he links with this: "because I go to the Father." Our Lord means exactly what he says but we must understand what he says. As His anointing by the Holy Ghost at His baptism was an era in His life, so also is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost a great era in the work of redemption in making effective the work of Christ's Church. “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us … God gives power and ability only to faith, and it is only when we learn that that these promises come alive in our life. While he was here on earth the fullness of God was available to man only in one human body, the body of Jesus. Why is this? By the strength and indwelling life of the Father he did all the works that we marvel at as we read the story of his life. It is significant to note that, though Jesus never taught his disciples how to preach, he did teach them how to pray. A significant amount of the teaching on the School of Intimacy and Prayer is devoted to developing your relationship with the Holy Spirit. The other night at our Board of Elders meeting we were wrestling with this problem. O, God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit … And they were all filled with the Holy … 1. His gifts are the dispensations of His presence. Why did Jesus, the Creator of the World, and our Savior, need to rely on the Holy Spirit in His ministry on earth?Or did He? It is to be noted that in John 14:16, where Jesus engages to pray the Father to send another Comforter, who would dwell with His disciples and be in them, that this is not a prayer that the Holy Spirit might do His work in making us children of God by regeneration, but it was for that fuller grace and power and Person of the Holy Spirit which we can claim by virtue of our relation as children of God. In the direction in the Sermon on the Mount, we have the very plain and definite promise, "If ye, being evil,[]know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father in Heaven give good things to them that ask him?" In my experience I have discovered it is possible to have God at arm's length, dwelling with me. Our prayers and activities are so feeble and resultless, because He has not worked in us and cannot work in us His glorious work. These 9 prayers for the Holy Spirit’s power will help you to reach out for the Lord’s guidance and strength. The Spirit that ever linked Christ to His Father and the redemptive mission is the same Spirit that would strengthen the disciples in their journey of faith. As he read, he discovered that this was the book because it revealed the One who understood him. The Holy Spirit helps to guide us and leads us towards living a more Christ-filled life. One was authorized activity, the other was unauthorized. Policemen do their business "in the name of the law.". Expectation is the condition by which this becomes realized. He is laying Himself out in command and promise in the strongest way, showing us that if we will lay ourselves out in prayer and will persevere, rising to higher and stronger attitudes and sinking to deeper depths of intensity and effort, that the answer must inevitibly come. Historically, it was true that these disciples were not to receive the indwelling of the Spirit until the Day of Pentecost. A few days after Pentecost the disciples were in an agony of prayer, "and when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit." Prayer can be audible or silent, private or public, formal or informal. A total failure! His ministry among men, as a man, was a failure. He is the enabling agent in God's new dispensation of doing. The Enliven School of Intimacy and Prayer is an online video course that can be completed at your own pace, and you can find out more here . A Christian's true work is borrowed activity, it is never his own, and when he begins to think it is, he defeats every possibility of success. Wait in the Lord for the Holy Spirit. Why? The Apostolic Church in action illustrates the same great truth. The Holy Spirit is not only the bright lamp of the Christian Dispensation, its Teacher and Guide, but is the Divine Helper. I am ready to obey." The marvelous facts of Christ's life told by hearts unanointed by the Holy Spirit will be dry and sterile, or "like a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Holy Spirit, we ask thee to search our own hearts on this day, and save us from this damnable perfidy of talking truth and not living it, of echoing orthodoxy but refusing to submit in practical ways, or shepherding our resources and protecting our lives and refusing to fling them into thy cause and abandon ourselves to thy purposes. Now that does not mean "He who is a Christian." Mary could not live over that Christ-life in the home of John, though she had nurtured the Christ and stored heart and mind full of holy and motherly memories, till she was empowered by the Holy Spirit. The prophet Joel writes, Our ability to work for God, and to pray to God, and live for God, and affect others for God, will be dependent on the measure of the Holy Spirit received by us, dwelling in us, and working through us. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Until you have grasped that as the mystery and key of Christian living you have not graduated from the kindergarten level of the Christian life. In the third verse above on the Holy Spirit, the first two sentences are giving us another powerful piece of revelation on this whole topic. A Prayer to the Holy Spirit “This is the mystery of Pentecost: The Holy Spirit illuminates the human spirit and, by revealing Christ Crucified and Risen, indicates the way to become more like him, that is, to be ‘the image and instrument of the love which flows from Christ. 16And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever— 17the Spirit of truth. We need Him, and we need to stir ourselves up to seek Him. "Oh," you say, "I'm not in rebellion against the Spirit of God. But when the Spirit of Truth is come, he takes away the veils, he dissolves the mists. That is what he is saying. The names that he uses here suggest the richness of this promise. Perhaps in this place, more fully than anywhere else, our Lord unfolds to us the unique secret of Christianity, that aspect of life that has been called "the exchanged life." I know as well as you do that every believer, when he receives Jesus Christ, receives the indwelling Spirit of God, that He is in us from the beginning. I simply tried to call attention to the moral revolt that is widespread in the United States today and the fact that it is eating away at our national life and destroying the very foundation of our government, things that you read and are hearing today on every side. He began to read it and he discovered that this was the answer to his life-long search for what he called "a book that understands me." Christ lays down the clear and explicit law of prayer in this regard for all of God's children. There were gathered at the breakfast some two hundred men from that area, many of them non-Christians, and with us were the three mayors of the cities of Laguna Beach, Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. 13And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. One of the most well-known Roman Catholic prayers to the Holy Spirit, "Come Holy Spirit," is a good daily prayer to recite privately or with your family.If you are praying with others, the leader should recite the verse ("Send forth . These great promises have a condition linked with them that qualifies them, and without the fulfillment of the condition the promise will never work. Remember, I warned you of that. Which one wins? In previous teaching, we studied who is the Holy Spirit. Thus, a conditioning statement is always the road to fulfillment. His work in us to make us the children of God and His Person abiding with us and in us, as children of God, are entirely different stages of the same Spirit in His relation to us. This incident destroys every theory which denies prayer as the condition of the coming and recoming of the Holy Spirit after Pentecost, and confirms the view that Pentecost as the result of a long struggle of prayer is illustrative and confirmatory that God's great and most precious gifts and conditioned on asking, seeking, knocking, prayer, ardent, importunate prayer. One of the most interesting verses where the Holy Spirit, prayer and boldness come together is found in Acts 4:23-31. The whole lesson culminates in asking for the Holy Spirit as the great objective point of all praying. The mightiest operation of God in us brings the mightiest praying. Much of his teaching on prayer is found in this rich and fragrant passage, which is called The Upper Room Discourse, found in John, Chapters 13 through 17. Here was a wealthy, affluent area. I remember Mr. Hendricks pausing and saying to us, with great significance, "Have you ever thanked God for unanswered prayer?". “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit …” Ephesians 4:30. The purpose of the power of the Holy Spirit is for making us into witnesses (Acts 1:8). It is the same action, and exactly the same man. Here are eight ways: 1. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. As Jesus did not begin His work on earth till He was anointed by the Holy Spirit, so the same Holy Spirit is necessary to carry forward and make effective the atoning work of the Son of God. In other words, he is not contrasting our labors now with his labors then. One was truly done in the name of the law, the other was done outside the law, even though the same words were used. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is more than a church doctrine, it is a promise from God to His people. The role of the Holy Spirit: to give us strength and help in our fight against sin. Because Jesus says "... he dwells with you, and he will be in you," and there is a vital distinction there. It is theoretically acceptable, but it is practically unbelievable. It is time now in our study of prayer to relate the subject to the total spectrum of Christian living. We were wrestling with this problem. The promise is so staggering that we attempt immediately to soften it. There is no passage that does it more effectively than the passage before us. D. We can expect to receive a more intimate relationship to the Holy Spirit because it is a “good” desire in most instances. When our friend, Mr. Hendricks, was a single young man in college he met a young lady whose mother immediately had designs on him. Holy Spirit, we ask thee to search our own hearts on this day, and save us from this damnable perfidy of talking truth and not living it, of echoing orthodoxy but refusing to submit in practical ways, or shepherding our resources and protecting our lives and refusing to fling them into thy cause and abandon ourselves to thy purposes. 1. If we take this as absolutely unlimited, a sort of magical Aladdin's lamp that we can rub and ask for any possible thing in the world, certainly we have missed the true point of this passage. The projecting power of praying is the measure of the Holy Spirit in us. In this latter work, His gifts and works are greater, and His presence, even Himself, is greater than His works or gifts. There is a condition to this, however. Why not? For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought …” (Romans 8:26) Those who came, attracted by the things they saw, faded back into the shadows when persecution began to grow. This is the secret of a Christian: He is not living his own life, he is living another's life. Christ lays down the doctrine that the reception of the Holy Spirit is conditioned on prayer, and He Himself illustrated this universal law, for when the Holy Spirit came upon Him at His baptism, He was praying. 2. Whatever he is interested in having done on earth, then we, as the instruments of his activity, are involved in accomplishing it. We sense immediately that this is too wide. In Verses 12 through 17, three revelations are given of the life of Jesus Christ at work within us: In Verse 12 we learn that the character of a Christian's work is "borrowed activity"; in Verses 13-14 we shall find that the basis of a Christian's prayer is "borrowed authority"; and in Verses 15-17 it is revealed that the secret of a Christian's living is "borrowed deity.". He is out in a residential area and for some reason on his own, in his drunken stupor, he stumbles up the steps of a house, and knocks on the door, and says, "Open inna name of the law." For the higher and graduating lessons in prayer we must have the Holy Spirit. 1. That frightens and staggers us. It comes from the wordfortis, that is, "to make strong," andcom means "with." I have learned, by long experience and by the Word of God, to recognize that that feeling of inadequacy is an excellent thing. I tried to point out something of the moral emptiness of a life like that, and how futile and meaningless and purposeless life seems to be, and what the Christian answer is. The Holy Spirit is a gift from the Father much like your salvation is a gift. For Jesus is not saying here that a sincere, dedicated Christian of 1964 will actually be able, in his sincerity and his dedicated religious effort, to do what Jesus did in the 1st century, let alone do greater works than he did. Not even the precious blood can execute the gospel. Intellect cannot execute it, neither can learning, nor eloquence, nor truth, not even the revealed truth can execute the gospel. Ask with urgency, ask without fainting. Acts 8:17 (NASB) Then they began laying their hands on them, and they were receiving the Holy Spirit. Now do you see what he means when he says "greater works than these will you do, because I go to the Father?" Prayer. If you ask anything in my name, I will do it. What is the explanation of that? The Holy Spirit Will Help You With Your Prayer Life. They will never understand them because man is both the specimen to be examined and the examiner, and the problem is that the error that is in the examiner affects the examination! Even within a marriage, if our relationship is based only on mutual feelings or common values and not on the Spirit, it runs the risk of being swallowed up by the erotic and emotional. This is what he means, "Greater work than these shall you do, because I go to the Father." Jesus said, "... even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him." He only has the regal authority to do this royal work. I read a wonderful testimony by Dr. Emile Caillet concerning his discovery of the Bible as an agnostic young man. There is a condition here. 1. We understand, receive, and discern spiritual truth through our human spirit by the anointing of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:14; John 14:26). That was all the Incarnate Christ had to show for the marvelous ministry in the power of the Spirit which he had manifested among men. I don't rebel against him." What is the difference? Would we be perfect in all graces? Praying in the Spirit is a gift to be received through faith in Christ Jesus. Frequently as we read these great passages of the Scripture, we are either so dazzled by the promise that we fail to heed the condition, or we are so frightened by the condition that we pay little heed to the promise. Jesus said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. They had been told not to “speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus” (Acts 4:18). Praying this Prayer to the Holy Spirit throughout the entire year will allow young people to develop a deeper relationship with the Holy Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s life is an on-going process of becoming holy through sanctification. Only tongues set on fire by the Holy Spirit can witness the saving power of Christ with power to save others. "He who believes in me." 5. This law of prayer for the Holy Spirit presses on the Master and on the disciples as well. What a staggering promise this is! For permission to use this content, please review Is that what he is saying? The Sevenfold Holy Spirit: The Spirit of the Fear of the Lord Hey everybody, I'm taking the plunge into a major life change to become a full-time missionary. Scripture about Praying in the Spirit “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. "In Christ's name" means in his authority, on the basis of his character, in the value of his work. Those within hear the thick voice and recognize that it is a drunken policeman and refuse to open. All rights reserved. The power of God to do for us was measured by the power of God in us. In this word, Jesus is saying that he who comes will be the One who has within him the fullness of power, all the strength that we could possibly need, that is the first thing. But that life begins and ever increases as the child of God prays for the Holy Spirit. His work in us prepares us for Himself. He is the Father's greatest gift for the child's greatest need. 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