The Holy Spirit #3 - Who is the Holy Spirit? (Part 3)
Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund unpacks Galatians 5:16-21, showing that walking with the Holy Spirit — not rule-keeping or willpower — is what actually reorders our desires. A candid, hope-filled look at temptation, relational conflict, and what it means to stay in step with God today.
Summary and Application
"Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh" (Galatians 5:16). It's one sentence, but Kurt spent an entire message unpacking it, because most of us have the order backward. We tend to think: clean up your life first, and then you'll have a good spiritual life. Paul says the opposite. Walk with the Spirit first, and the rest follows.
Walking Means Staying in Step
In the original language, "walk by the Spirit" is a command in the present tense — something continual, not a one-time decision. Kurt compared it to walking with a friend: you're in step with him through the highs and lows, arranging your life around the relationship rather than checking boxes. That's different from simply following rules. As Kurt put it, keeping a law is actually easier than pleasing someone you love. Marriage doesn't run on rules like "come home at night" — you can technically keep every rule and still be a lousy spouse, because the real aim is deeper than compliance. Walking with the Spirit works the same way: it's relational before it's mechanical.
Desire Isn't the Enemy
Paul warns that walking with the Spirit keeps us from "the desires of the flesh" (Galatians 5:16). That phrase can sound like every human craving is suspect. But Kurt pointed out that the Greek word here, epithumia, combines "desire" with a prefix meaning "over" — it's really an over-desire. The desires themselves — for intimacy, for connection, for meaning — are gifts from God. C.S. Lewis argued that when we find desires nothing in this world can fully satisfy, the likely explanation is that we were made for another world, and earthly pleasures are meant to point us toward it, not substitute for it. The problem isn't wanting things. It's taking a good desire outside the boundaries where it actually flourishes — like fire, which warms a home but devastates a forest.
The Weight Is Relational
Galatians 5:19-21 lists the "acts of the flesh" in four groups, separated by semicolons: sexual sin (three words), twisted religious practice (two words), relational breakdown (eight words), and personal excess (two words). Kurt drew attention to the math: eight of the fifteen words describe relational disharmony — hatred, discord, jealousy, rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy. We tend to assume sexual sin is the "big" category in this list, but by sheer volume, Paul is more concerned with how we treat people. Persistent conflict with a mother, a sibling, a boss, a neighbor, after neighbor, after neighbor, eventually points somewhere uncomfortable: "at some point, it's you." Ongoing relational turmoil isn't just an interpersonal problem — Paul treats it as a spiritual one.
The Old Lie, Still Working
Kurt traced the deeper logic back to Eden. The serpent's pitch to Eve wasn't complicated: God is holding out on you, and if you take control yourself, you'll finally be satisfied. That's the same lie behind every "work of the flesh" in this list — the whisper that something better exists outside of God's boundaries, if we'll just reach for it ourselves. Verse 17 names the resulting tension directly: "the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh... so that you do not do whatever you want." That conflict isn't a sign something's wrong with you. It's what it feels like to actually be walking with the Spirit instead of drifting.
Don't Quench It, Don't Grieve It
Kurt closed with two warnings from elsewhere in the New Testament: "Do not quench the Spirit" (1 Thessalonians 5:19) and "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God" (Ephesians 4:30). Quenching is dismissing a prompting before you've even considered it — "no, I don't think that's God." Grieving is worse: recognizing what the Spirit is asking and choosing not to do it anyway. Both respond to the same Spirit who convicts us of sin, glorifies Jesus (John 16:14), and — per Isaiah 63:10 — can be genuinely resisted by people he loves. But Kurt was clear that the point was never simply avoiding a list. It's trusting that God's boundaries are an invitation to something better, even when the desire in front of you insists otherwise.
Questions for Reflection
Where have you been quenching or resisting something the Spirit has been pointing out in your life lately — and what's made it hard to just say yes?
This week, is there one relationship where persistent friction might be pointing to something deeper than "they're difficult" — and what would it look like to walk toward it with the Spirit instead of away from it?
This post was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence based on the sermon "The Holy Spirit #3 - Who is the Holy Spirit? (Part 3)" by Dr. Kurt Bjorklund (Galatians 5:16-21, September 19-20, 2026). While every effort has been made to faithfully represent the content and intent of the original message, readers are encouraged to engage the full sermon audio or transcript for the complete teaching.
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C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, 1952)
Creatures aren't born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists, such as a baby's hunger or a duckling's wish to swim. If we find in ourselves a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. Earthly pleasures were meant to arouse that desire and point toward the real thing, so we should never despise them, and never mistake them for the real thing. Instead, we should keep alive the desire for our true country and make it the main object of life to press on toward it and help others do the same.
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Let's pray together. God, as we're gathered here today, I ask that you would speak into each of our lives, help us to grow in our understanding of you, our affection for you, and our devotion to you. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
We're in a series on the Holy Spirit. In Christian thinking, you have God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. It's a big deal. And yet in a lot of churches, the Holy Spirit is either everything or almost nothing. So we wanted to take a few weeks to consider the Holy Spirit.
Here's part of why this is such a big deal. If you have a small view of the Holy Spirit, what you may end up doing is reducing your Christian experience to "I believe certain things, and if I believe the right things, then one day I'll get to some kind of eternal state that will be blissful compared to what I have here." Although that is true and it is hopeful, the promise of the Holy Spirit is that God, the God of the universe, will be with you and in you through all of the highs and the lows of the life that you are currently living. That is the promise of the Holy Spirit.
This series began with us looking at the person and the work of the Holy Spirit. Last week we talked about being filled with the Spirit, and today we're going to talk about walking in the Spirit, being led by the Spirit. You may say, "Well, walking, being led, being filled, aren't those all synonyms that basically mean the same thing?" There are similarities. But being filled, in my estimation, has more to do with the experience, the sense of God's presence. Walking has more to do with compliance to the Spirit. Although there are certainly overlaps where compliance and experience are similar, there is a distinction.
Verse 16 of Galatians 5 says very simply, "Walk by the Spirit." In the original language, this is an imperative, meaning it's a command, and it's present tense, meaning it's something that is continual, ongoing, that we do over and over. To walk with the Spirit, like walking with a friend, means you walk with him in the highs and the lows. You have a sense of togetherness; you're in step with him, living in accordance with him, arranging your life with him. That is what it means to walk in the Spirit.
Then it says, if you walk by the Spirit, you will not fulfill or gratify the desires of the flesh. If you've been around church, you've probably heard this phrase and thought, "Okay, the desires of the flesh. I get that that's a bad thing." And if you haven't been around church a whole lot, or maybe this is part of what you don't like about church, you say, "I don't actually want to hear a list of all the things I shouldn't do. That's why I want to avoid church." If you're concerned that what's coming is a list of things you should avoid, you're absolutely right. It's in this passage, just so you know. But I want you to stay with me for a moment, because this is much bigger than simply saying, "Here are things to avoid."
In fact, in this little word "desires," some of the older translations say "lust of the flesh," which sounds even more foreboding. But this word in the original language is the Greek word epithumia. Thumia is a passion, a desire, and epi is a prefix that carries a sense of "over." So the word together is this idea of an over-desire. Here's the point: the desires of our flesh are not necessarily wrong in and of themselves. It's the over-desires for the things of our flesh that get us into trouble.
Here's why that's significant. If you see every desire of your flesh as somehow being problematic, you'll end up with a weird dichotomy between the spiritual and the earthly, or fleshly. Rather, God has given us good desires to be celebrated, but he has also given us boundaries where they work best for us. Here's how C.S. Lewis wrote about this a generation or two ago now.
Creatures aren't born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists, such as a baby's hunger or a duckling's wish to swim. If we find in ourselves a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. Earthly pleasures were meant to arouse that desire and point toward the real thing, so we should never despise them, and never mistake them for the real thing. Instead, we should keep alive the desire for our true country and make it the main object of life to press on toward it and help others do the same.
The reason I like that portion from C.S. Lewis is that he says there are these desires, and they exist because they're part of God's good creation. So the desires that you may sometimes see as a list of things you shouldn't do are often God-given cravings that are taken to a place they should not be taken. That's why they become problematic. Again, here's what I want you to see: when we read the phrase "walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh," it's not saying that you need to kill all desire. It's saying, channel your desire correctly.
Now notice one other thing here. When it says, "Walk by the Spirit and you will not fulfill the desires of the flesh," notice the order, because normally this is turned around in how people think about it. Usually people say, "Stop fulfilling the desires of the flesh, then you'll walk by the Spirit." In other words, get your life cleaned up, then you'll have a good spiritual life. But what this is actually saying is, walk by the Spirit, have a life that's informed by the Spirit of God, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. That order matters.
So what is this list? Here it is, verses 19 through 21. It says, "The acts of the flesh are obvious." If you're reading in the NIV, which is what we teach from here on weekends, there's a colon here. The colon means now comes the list. Then if you look at the list, there are words separated by commas and by semicolons. You may say, "Okay, Kurt, you're really going into the weeds here." But the semicolon means that the words that appear with the commas are a section of thought. The semicolon separates out that thought, and then another set of thoughts follows. So there are actually four categories of words here. There's a list of fifteen works of the flesh, but four categories.
The first category is what I'm just going to call unrestrained sexual practice. These are the first three words that appear: "The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery;" semicolon. Do you see it? This is the first category. Sexual immorality is the generic word that's used for any kind of sexual activity that's outside the bounds God has given us. By the way, the Greek word here is porneia, and you can see where we get our word pornography. It's talking about something outside of bounds. Then he uses the word "uncleanliness" to talk about maybe our thoughts, but really anything that's outside of God's boundaries. "Debauchery" means completely unrestrained living, living with no sense of boundaries.
Here's again why this is important. The sexual desires that God has given you are not bad desires; they are good desires. They are God-given desires for intimacy and for pleasure. That is a gift from the Creator of the universe. But when they're outside their proper bounds, they can become destructive. The best way to think about this is like a fire. A fire in its proper bounds gives warmth and ambiance and glow, and it can heat and cook food. Outside of its bounds, it can devastate.
If you think about a young man, an old man, who looks at pornography, which is outside of God's bounds, what he's doing when he looks at pornography is not saying, "What I want is this picture." He's craving the intimacy of genuine connection, and he's settling for a substitute. That's what happens when somebody hooks up. They're settling for a substitute for the intimacy that they are legitimately craving. So the works of the flesh are often, when they're outside of the bounds of the legitimate desire, a counterfeit for the real thing.
Then we get this semicolon and we get the second set of words. The second set is just two words: idolatry and witchcraft. This is probably referring to some kind of twisted religious practice. Idolatry is really the idea of what we worship. We often think of worshiping a graven image, but if you've been around Orchard Hill, you've heard us talk about idolatry as anything that we worship in place of God, anything we make ultimate and say, "This is what I want most." Witchcraft here probably is not somebody with a hat casting spells. This is probably somebody who is using any means they can to connect with the divine other than the true God. So twisted religious practice, as a work of the flesh, is saying, "I want to worship what I want rather than the true God," or "I'm using any means to connect to the divine."
Then we get another semicolon, so another thought comes, and here it's significant that there are eight words that come next. The reason I say this is significant is that you get three words, two words, eight words, and then just two words again at the end. The point I want you to see is that the weight of this list is toward relationally destructive patterns, which is what these next eight words are. When people talk about the works of the flesh, or sin, we often emphasize sexuality, or you hear that emphasized. But notice that, just from the sheer number of words, relational turmoil is actually a bigger deal than the sexual issues. When you're at odds relationally with people, it's a spiritual issue. There's a spiritual problem. There's a work of the flesh that creates relational disharmony.
Now, I know some of you are saying, "Yeah, but you didn't know my mother." You're right, I didn't. But here's my point. If you had a problem with your mother and your brother and your sister-in-law, and you took your first job and your boss was a real problem, and at your second job the boss was an idiot, and at the third job the boss was the problem, and in the first neighborhood you lived in you had bad neighbors, and in the second neighborhood you had some bad neighbors, and in the third neighborhood you had some bad neighbors, and you have connections at work and the coworker... at some point, it's you.
I'm not saying that to say anything other than that works of the flesh create relational problems. If we were created to live in harmony and in relationship, then when we have disharmony, there's an element in which the Spirit has not been primary in our lives. Now, I'm not suggesting that you can't have a problem with your sister-in-law or a boss. What I'm saying is that when it is persistent, we have to begin looking in the mirror.
Here is the list of words that are used here. First, hatred, which means hostility toward somebody. Discord, which means competition or rivalry. There's jealousy, which means you don't want somebody else to have good things. There's fits of rage, which means an uncontrolled temper. There's selfish ambition, which means you want things for yourself. There's dissensions, which means you're standing apart from other people. There's factions, which means those dissensions have become permanent parties. And then there's envy, where you start to want what other people have. The point here, again, is that our relational turmoil points to a spiritual problem.
Semicolon, again. So we have sexual deeds, twisted religious practices, relational disharmony, and then the final couple of words deal with personal indulgence: drunkenness and orgies. You start just saying, "I'm putting everything into my life."
Now, I would guess that some of us, especially if church hasn't always been your thing and God hasn't always been your thing, hear this and say, "I don't know that I like a don't-do list anywhere in my life. This doesn't feel good to me. I just want to live, and I want God to give me grace along the way and figure it out down the road." So why would God set up a system, or a world, in which there are these desires for things, and then there are illegitimate ways to fulfill the desires that bring devastation into us?
In order to understand this, you actually have to go back to the Garden of Eden. If you remember the account in Genesis, God creates Adam and Eve. He places them in the garden. Things are as they should be, and as they live in the garden, there's one condition: don't eat fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden. The serpent comes along and basically says to Eve, "Hey, if you eat fruit from this tree, you're going to be like God." And she goes, "Really? That sounds good." And she takes a bite. By the way, it's fruit, not apple, if you're tracking this. She takes a bite, and now she goes to Adam, and Adam takes a bite.
What was the lie of Satan in this instance? God is holding out on you. There's something better for you than what God has given you, and if you take it into your own hands, then you will be satisfied. What is the lie of the deeds of the flesh? There is something better that God is holding out on me, and if I do what I want, I'm going to feel more fulfilled than if I trust God. That is exactly what happens for us when we're sexually tempted to take matters into our own hands, when we worship another idol or try to connect with the divine apart from God, when we're relationally in turmoil, and even when we're given to excess.
You may again say, "Well, why did God put a tree in the garden? Okay, I get it, but what's the point?" Well, there's a song that came out several years ago. It was a woman singing about why she dumped this guy. I think the song was called "What He Didn't Do." In the song she's justifying it, and she says, "I'm not going to tell you what he did, because evidently he did some dumb stuff." But her chorus is, "Here's what he didn't do."
[Lyrics omitted from this transcript. In the chorus, she lists the ways he failed to treat her right, including that he didn't put her first and didn't stay home because he wanted to.]
That phrase about staying home because he wanted to caught my attention when I first heard this song, and here's why. What is it you want? If you're married, or you're dating somebody, what do you want with that person? You want them to choose you over everything else. So if you have to have the conversation that says, "You're going out again? You're choosing that over me," you're already in a losing place, right? Because what you want is for them to say, "I'm choosing you. You're first."
Why did God put a tree in the middle of the garden and say, "You can have everything, but don't eat this tree"? It's not because God needed to know what we were choosing. I think he wanted Adam and Eve— And the reason there are deeds of the flesh is that he wants us to be able to say, "I'm choosing you. I trust your goodness over what I can see or feel here today." What we need to understand about that is that God's way is good.
Now, verse 21 should cause us to stop dead in our tracks. Here's what it says after this long list and a period, if you're tracking semicolons and colons: "I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God." That should stop us in our tracks, because anytime the Bible says, "Let me tell you, get this wrong and you're not going to inherit the kingdom," it leads people to have all kinds of debates, about this and other Scriptures around it, on what constitutes saving faith.
Some will say, "Saving faith is nothing more than you coming to a point where you say, 'I have trusted Jesus Christ, and whatever I do doesn't matter.'" Other people say, "No, you must do certain things as evidence of this." Here's the problem I see in this kind of conversation. If bad things can keep you out of the kingdom of heaven, then good things can get you into the kingdom of heaven. And the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we don't earn our way. Jesus Christ has provided the way.
But this passage says, "Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of heaven." And here's the problem for me, at least. When I read the list, there are at least a couple of things on there that I have not eradicated completely from my life. I have envied. I have had moments of discord, and hatred, according to the text. It's been a while since a couple of the other things, but those ones are still there. So do I need to say, "Oh, the kingdom of God, it's not coming"?
Here's the thing. It says, "Those who live like this." This is talking about a pattern of life without a turning, or without a recognition, or without being troubled by it. Here's why I say that. If you never get to a point where you're troubled by these things, these works of the flesh, and you start to say, "This is not God's intention," then you probably don't have the Spirit of God. I think that's what's being said. You haven't actually been born of the Spirit of God. What you're doing instead is simply saying, "I have grace now. I can do whatever it is I want to do." That is not the message of Jesus Christ. The message of Jesus Christ is that God, through Jesus, made it possible for you to have eternal life if you believe. And once you believe, the Spirit lives inside of you and will change you so that you don't always want what you thought you wanted.
You see, here's what this text says in verse 17: "For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do whatever you want." In other words, the flesh and the Spirit are at odds. You don't just do what you want. You're going to choose the Spirit sometimes. Here's what this means. Sometimes some of these deeds of the flesh will get in front of you, and you will want what it is, and you will need to say, "I'm resisting this right now." Other times, you may be able to see it coming from farther away, and what you need to do is say, "I want to remind myself and realign my heart with the things of God. I want what God wants more than what this thing is."
Now, again, remember that a lot of times these are good desires taken to an extreme. So the issue isn't saying, "I'll never have that," but saying, "I'm only going to have it in the way that God has said it's good to have it." Because what do scammers do when they try to get into your bank accounts, or whatever? They try to convince you that something's true that isn't. That is exactly what the enemy does today. "If I don't have this, I'll never be happy. If I can't do this, then my life will not have the meaning that I think it should have."
So verse 17 very simply says that these two things are in conflict, so that you are not to do whatever you want. Then verse 18 says, "But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law." On one hand, he says in verse 17 that these two things are at odds, and you can't do whatever you want. Then he says that if you're led by the Spirit, you're not under the law. This has led, again, to some debate about whether Christians are under the law. Clearly this is an allusion to the Mosaic Law, the Old Testament law. But it's not illegitimate to ask in what sense principles, rules, and laws still play a part in our Christian experience today. This has led, like I said, to some debate.
I'm going to show you a picture. This is from Zion National Park. It's called Angels Landing. This is where you can walk up this ridge, and it's one of the iconic trails in the park system. I went to the park one time in my life, and when I got there, the hike was closed. I think somebody had fallen; that's what has gone on there. So this is a picture. The reason I show it to you, and I don't totally agree with what I'm about to say, but you'll remember the picture, is that the way people have often seen the gospel, or the way of Jesus Christ, is that you have to walk on this narrow path, and there are two ditches on either side that lead to destruction. On one side there's what people call easy believism, and on the other side there's legalism. Licentiousness and legalism are these two extremes that you have to avoid.
The thinking goes something like this. Licentiousness, or easy believism, says, "I just believe, and I can do whatever I want." That's verse 17. Then verse 18 is, "Well, I still need to do these things. I still have a law that I have to obey." But notice what this text says. It says you can't do whatever you want, and you're not under the law. This is why I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy to put these on either side, because there are problems in both. The easy-believism side basically says that grace means there's nothing that has to change in my life. And the law side says I have to constantly obey the law in order to get where I want to go.
But why does it say the person who's led by the Spirit isn't under the law? I think it's because this is not the best analogy. Here's what I mean. If you're dating or married, you get this. If you work in a business for somebody, you'll get this. Law is actually easy to keep compared to trying to please somebody. In the Bible, the idea of walking with the Spirit, John 16:14, talks about the Holy Spirit, and the role of the Holy Spirit is to glorify God. So what happens in our spiritual life is that when we walk with the Spirit, we move beyond law. I didn't say we leave law behind, but we move beyond it. That is, we're trying to please God, not simply keep the law. Keeping the law, relative to pleasing God, is easy.
To put it into the marriage relationship: if you get married, you can say, "Hey, we're no longer about rules and law. We just love each other," right? But there are still some rules. Like, come home at night. Don't just not come home. That's generally a rule in marriage, even if you haven't stated it, and if you don't believe it, try just not going home for a few nights and see what happens. That's a rule. Another rule that sometimes happens is, "Let's put our money together, so bring your paycheck. You don't just go spend whatever you want and leave me to pay all the bills." You may have a different system, but that tends to be a rule that we somehow get to in marriage.
Here's my point. You can come home every night and sleep in your bed and share your money and be a lousy spouse, because that is not the essence of what it means to be loved. You can go to work and do exactly what your boss tells you to do and be a lousy employee, because you are not trying to further the good of the company and make your boss's life better. In terms of anticipating and understanding, pleasing is bigger than the law. Walking with the Spirit is bigger than the law. That's my point.
What we need to understand is that to walk by the Spirit may sound mechanical, like I just put one foot in front of another, and there's a little bit of that. To be led by the Spirit sounds almost esoteric. So is this a mechanical thing? Is this "I just hear from God"? Which is it? The truth of the matter is, it's both. There will be things where you'll just say, "This is the next thing I know, so I'm going to take the next step." And there will be times when the Spirit of God will work in you to convict you. This was John 14, a couple of weeks ago. It's one of the Spirit's roles, to convict of sin. And the Spirit will at times prompt you to something that is not necessarily a law, not "Hey, this is exactly what the text says to do." The Spirit may prompt you toward something.
I had this happen to me a while ago. I was speaking at a week-long conference for a church group, and they were going to pay me at the end of the week. I made a decision years ago that whenever I speak somewhere besides Orchard Hill, I'm just going to take whatever money I'm given and give it away, so that I never start to tally how much somebody pays me. It's just a way I do it. What I usually do is take it as a kind of giving slush fund where I hold it, and then I ask, "Where is there a need where I can just bless somebody?" That's usually what I do. It's kind of fun, because it's money that I can just give whenever I see a need.
I was standing in the worship service on the last day of this conference, and I felt this prompt. Some of you will get this, and some of you will think I'm a little crazy here, but I felt like God was saying, "I want you to give the money to the mission fund of this organization." And I'm like, "No, I don't think that's what you want. I want this in my little slush fund, where I can give it where I want." And I felt like God just said, "I want you to give it to this organization, because you're not going to get any thank-yous, and no one's going to care that you gave the money. Are you going to give it the way that I'm asking you to give it?" And I'm like, "No, I don't think that's the Spirit of God."
Now, here's my point. It may not have been the Spirit of God. We don't always know. But if you're walking with the Spirit, you will at times have the Spirit of God say to you, in very clear terms, that the path you're on is the wrong path. And at very clear times, "I want you to do something that seems out of character." Those moments, and this is the reason I referenced John 16:14 about glorifying God, will usually not be things that make a big deal of you. They will be things that make a big deal of God. They will be things that take you out of your comfort zone, that cost you, that are unpleasant for you, but that make much of the glory of God. That is when you start to say, "Okay, I'm walking in the Spirit."
Now, I haven't intentionally given you a lot of how-tos for walking in the Spirit. Part of it is that walking is simple and intuitive. Being led by the Spirit is maybe harder in some ways. But what we need to see, and I'm just going to give you two other Scriptures, is that often the way to think about this is in terms of responding to the Spirit of God. Here are two other places, very quickly, where the Spirit is mentioned with a negative comment.
Here's the first one. See if you can see where I get this idea. I'm going to say that we shouldn't quench the Spirit. Here's where I get this: 1 Thessalonians 5:19. "Do not quench the Spirit." See where I got that? Sometimes people hear this and say, "Well, quenching the Spirit..." The word quench in the original language is like "don't put out a fire." And they'll say the Spirit is like a fire of God, so never speak disparagingly about the Spirit anywhere the Spirit's working. That could be. But if you read the context, it has to do with the sanctifying work of God. A couple of verses down, it says that very plainly. So what does "don't quench the Spirit" mean? It means that you don't resist the movement of the Spirit when the Spirit is prompting you away from something or toward something.
Here's what this means. When you start to feel a sense of conviction about something and you say, "No, I don't think that's the Spirit," do you know what that is? That's quenching the Spirit of God. And if you're normal, you're tempted to do that on a regular basis. Some of you, when we read through the list earlier, had the Spirit of God prompt you. It brought something to mind where your life is out of line with the Spirit of God right now. And you sat here just a moment ago and said, "No, I don't think that's what you're asking, God." That is what it means to quench the Spirit.
Now, sometimes those promptings, when it's not a conviction of sin, are harder to understand. So sometimes your "no" might be correct. I'm not going to say that every time, because sometimes you get your own stuff in it and start saying, "This is going to be about me, and the Spirit prompted me to do this thing." So you do have to understand that. But most of the time it's going to be about changing something, something unpleasant, something difficult. And when you say no, you're quenching the Spirit of God.
Here's the second one. This is Ephesians 4:30, and I'm going to say here, don't grieve the Holy Spirit. See if you can see where I get this. "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." Now, what is grieving the Holy Spirit? Grieving the Holy Spirit means making the Holy Spirit sad. What makes the Holy Spirit sad? I think, in this context, it's when you haven't quenched the Spirit; you've agreed that something's of God, and you've decided not to do it anyway. One is denying the work of the Spirit, the leading of the Spirit. The other is saying, "I know this is right, and I'm not doing it."
This, by the way, was referenced in Isaiah 63:10: "Yet they rebelled." They didn't do what they knew they should do, and they grieved the Holy Spirit. And listen to this: "So he turned and became their enemy and he himself fought against them." Oh, my. Stay in step with the Spirit. Why? Because what's on the other side of spiritual life is the promise of God. What's on the other side of the works of the flesh is a counterfeit that Satan wants to deceive you with, saying, "This is where you will be most happy," but it will leave you with less than what the Spirit of God wants for you. Again, if you take my garden analogy of the Garden of Eden, God promises something, and he gives this negative condition. And when we choose the negative condition, he says, "Go ahead."
I know some of us are probably here right now, and we're probably saying, "I've made some choices. I've gone down a path. I quenched the Spirit, I grieved the Spirit, and I know I did. And I'm not sure that God will bring any new life or beauty to my situation." Can I just say, that is a lie from the deceiver telling you that you've gone too far and the hope is lost. You can turn, and God would love to work in your life. And not only that, some of us will have pain from having blown past some of these signs, and we'll say, "What was I thinking?" But let that pain remind you that God's way is an invitation to the best way.
See, walking with the Spirit is not about avoiding the list. Walking with the Spirit is about choosing what God wants for us. And what does it say when you walk by the Spirit? You won't gratify the desires of the flesh. It's not "stop it so that you get it." It's "do this, and you won't end up here." So there is hope, wherever you are, for this.
Some of you may say, "Hey, I haven't been down this way." But right now you've been dancing on the edge of some of these things. Maybe there's runaway envy in your life. Maybe there's resentment toward somebody and you haven't dealt with it, and the Spirit of God has prompted you. You can either quench the Spirit by going, "Ah, not a problem," or you can grieve the Spirit by saying, "Okay, I get it, but I'm choosing not to." Or you can say, "I'm in step with the Spirit today, because I'm choosing to trust the goodness of God over what has been shown over and over again in the works of the flesh, which lead us away from the good things that God promises."
Maybe you're here today and you're saying, "This all seems kind of out there to me." The works of the flesh are sinful. Sin separates us from God. And if you will acknowledge your sin and call on Jesus Christ as your Savior, what happens, according to the Scripture, is that you become a child of God whose standing is determined by what Jesus Christ has done, not by what you have done or have not done. So even today, you can just say, "God, I trust Jesus Christ, whatever my past has been," and say, "I am now somebody who will inherit your kingdom because of what Jesus Christ has done."
Let's pray together. God, I ask that you would help each person here, each person watching right now or in the future, to keep in step with the Spirit. Help us to see it as good and beautiful and right, and to choose it over the works of the flesh. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
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AI-generated disclaimer: This transcript was produced from an automated transcription and edited with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Filler words were removed and grammar and punctuation were cleaned up, but errors or omissions may remain. Scripture references and quoted material have not been independently verified. For the speaker's exact words, please refer to the original recording. Quoted material from the C.S. Lewis passage and the song lyrics has been summarized rather than reproduced.
