What is grieving the holy spirit

Coram Deo Just as we experience the joy of restoration upon repentance, so we makeamends for grieving the Spirit when we turn from our sin and seek to do Hiswill. Genesis —7 Isaiah —19 Mark —6 Acts — Proper, Edifying Talk Ephesians Earning an Honest Living Ephesians More on this Scripture Ephesians 4.

On Worldviews. James Anderson. The Podcast Pastor. John Piper. Derek Thomas. It is important for us to better understand the person of the Holy Spirit. There are six specific sins that can be committed against the Holy Spirit. Today, allow me to focus on one that can be committed by believers— grieving the Holy Spirit.

One of the places in Scripture where we read about grieving the Holy Spirit is in Ephesians The apostle Paul writes:.

Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them. Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of malicious behavior.

Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you. To grieve means to make sad or sorrowful. It means to cause sorrow, pain, or distress. Guess what? You are not to speak this way—privately or publicly.

How about being authentically godly instead? Some people just like to be mad. They live for conflict, arguing, and fighting. This, as with all sin, only gets worse if left unchecked and unrepented of. The sad thing is that bitter people rarely want to keep it to themselves. Instead, they spread it around. Fits of rage and uncontrolled anger make the Holy Spirit sad and sorrowful. Look, all of us have been hurt in life, but we have a choice as to how we react. To blend is to be able to produce a desired quality.

When the Holy Spirit can blend with the human spirit, He blends it into the personality of Jesus, making one great personality. He, however, will not blend with that which grieves Him. What does the word grieve mean? It means to burden. When the Holy Spirit is grieved, He is burdened. To grieve is to oppress. How sad to oppress someone so wonderful, so great as the Holy Spirit who has come to live on the inside of us to be our teacher and guide!

To grieve is to afflict with deep, acute sorrow—to afflict the Holy Spirit with deep sorrow because of saying and doing the wrong things.

To grieve is to make sad, to distress. We make the Holy Spirit sad, distressed when we disobey the Lord. He cannot possibly mix with that which is foreign to His personality. Quench not the Spirit—what does quench mean? By quenching the Holy Spirit, many people have excluded Him from their fasts.

Some people can fast forty days and not change. Every time I have fasted forty days—and there have been numbers of them down through the years—I called it victory. It was victory for Jesus when He fasted forty days and nights, and He is our example.

At the end of a forty-day fast, I close my case. When I prayed and fasted forty days and nights for the television tower, almost two years passed before it was erected, but I closed the case at the end of the fast. In a vision the Lord showed me the tower with His angel about two-thirds of the way up rejoicing. I believe God. In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, we read how people were victorious through faith.

They yielded to the Holy Spirit instead of grieving Him. The Holy Spirit and the human spirit blended into one, makes up the wonderful personality of Jesus. The Holy Spirit will not blend with your spirit unless you use the pure faith of God. Small disobediences grieve the Holy Spirit, little things of the flesh. Faith is to be used all the time: Faith which worketh by love Galatians To love the Lord is to please Him.

By saying you love Him while failing to please Him, by loving self or others more than you love God, you grieve the Holy Spirit. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him I John When you grieve the Holy Spirit, you cannot use His divine love.

You must not grieve the Holy Spirit at any time if you expect to have the divine faith of God and use it. In Hebrews we read that the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him Hebrews If you draw back from the Lord, you grieve the Holy Spirit.

His soul will have no pleasure in you. We were made in the image of God, given a miniature soul like the great soul of God, a soul that will live forever either in Heaven or in hell. The soul is eternal like God Himself. In the Garden of Eden, God enjoyed man and woman—before sin entered. After disobeying God, they reacted differently to the voice of the Lord.

And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself Genesis This is the first time man was ashamed of his nakedness, the first time he realized that his soul was unrighteous—naked—in the eyes of God. Before man sinned, he did not look on himself as being naked. Now guilt drove Adam and Eve into hiding. Who told thee that thou was naked? God asked. He knew that their new-found awareness came from the evil one to whom they had listened.

The sad story of how they had grieved the Spirit by disobeying God came pouring forth, and they were driven out of the Garden of Eden away from the voice and the daily companionship of God. How tragic! Abraham lived so close to God that God took him into His confidence, told him He was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.

And the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do; Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment; that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him Genesis Abraham stood before the Lord and pleaded for the righteous. Will you spare the city if there are fifty righteous?

The Lord loved Abraham so much that He said He would. Will you spare the city if there be forty-five righteous, if there be thirty righteous, if there be twenty righteous, if there be ten righteous? The Lord agreed not to destroy the city of the sake of ten righteous—however, ten righteous were not to be found in the city.

But the Bible tells us God delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds; The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished II Peter But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt Genesis Not until she looked back did she grieve the Holy Spirit out of her life.

The cutting-off time will come for those who persist in turning from Him. One of these days all the sinful on Earth will be cut off. Today the eyes of the Lord are running to and fro throughout the whole earth seeking the righteous to save.

He will take the righteous Bride out before destruction falls. Lot and his family are a type of the Bride. The two angels who pulled them away from destruction are a type of the Word and the Holy Spirit. Only unholiness, unrighteousness, that which is unclean remain behind, that which is despised by God. Jesus paid the supreme price on Calvary so that we could be delivered from all sin. By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him Hebrews ,6. He pleased God so much that the Lord took him to Heaven alive.

Nothing is said about the rest of his family, only him. And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him Genesis , But Enoch had done such a good job of walking with the Lord that the Lord wanted him up with Him in eternal paradise to be with Him all the time. In His wrath, God swore that they would not enter His rest. Forty years God was grieved with a stiffnecked, rebellious people.

Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest Psalm All who were twenty years and older, except Caleb and Joshua, died in the wilderness before their children could go into that land God had planned for them.

Through Moses the Lord told them, Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward which have murmured against me. Doubtless ye shall not come into the land, concerning which I sware to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun.

But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised. But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness Numbers God would have driven out seven nations out of the Promised Land for them. Instead, He drove out seven nations for their children.

And when he had destroyed seven nations in the land of Chanaan, he divided their land to them by lot Acts They could have had peace at last, lived in a land flowing with milk and honey. God would have been their captain. The Lord had been very good to them, protecting them, providing food and water, a cloud by day to shelter them in the wilderness and a pillar of fire at night. He told them, I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot Deuteronomy The Lord rained down food from heaven, called it angel food.

They were told to gather on the sixth day enough food for the seventh day, the day of rest. With great love and power the Lord had brought the Israelites out of Egypt, but again and again they grieved Him. They insisted that Aaron make a golden calf. They pleaded with Moses to tell God to never speak to them again.

And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die Exodus Think how God felt! To the children He loved so much, He had revealed Himself in a great way so they would know He was the one who would fulfill all their needs, who would lead them through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Think of the tears the Lord shed over Israel. Later, Israel grieved God by wanting a king. God let them have their way—He had given man free choice—but it grieved the heart of God.

Saul was anointed king. He started out well, humble and obedient before God; then he backslid. The Lord repented, regretted that He had ever made Saul king. He cried and cried, for in Samuel dwelled the Spirit of the living God; it was a part of him. The righteous are grieved when the Spirit is grieved, and the Spirit is grieved when the righteous are grieved.

The Lord is touched with the feeling of our infirmities Hebrews The Lord feels when we hurt, when we cry tears from the heart. He is a part of our personality, and we are a part of His. The grieving of the Spirit in Old Testament days is an enlightening study.

Israel grieved God until He killed thousands at a time. Sometimes the ground would open and swallow them up. Achan grieved the Lord. And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us? And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones Joshua Achan and his family were stoned because he grieved God. Over twenty-five hundred years ago, Joel saw the great pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh Joel The Early Church gloried in the pouring out; receiving it, they came into the spirit of pleasing God. They came into the yielding one hundred percent to the Holy Spirit, such perfect obedience that the Lord would allow no contamination in the midst of His people.

Ananias and his wife, members of the Early Church, each told just one lie, and God killed them. Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband Acts , God will pay any price to keep His people pure and clean.

He proved that by giving Jesus. What a disgrace the human race has been—trampling the blood of Jesus underfoot, blaspheming the name of God! If you claim to have Jesus today but are looking at the wrong things, you will grieve Him, hamper Him until finally He will leave, saith the Lord. Ears that listen to the wrong things, mouths that talk criticism and gossip are evidence of people in a degraded state.

Before Calvary, man was so unclean, so unholy that God would not walk with him. But then Jesus died for our sins, and all who accept the blood of Jesus into their hearts and souls are purged from the sin nature they were born with. Only the divine blood of Jesus could have done it; only the blood can keep you purged daily.

His blood must be applied to your heart and remain there day and night. If you sin, the blood no longer remains in your soul; you lose your salvation. Souls who had thought they were going to Heaven woke up in hell. We are told, remember, to not grieve the Spirit of God.

Disobedience grieves the Holy Spirit, any kind of disobedience. To continue in disobedience makes you weaker and weaker, pulls you into self to such an extent that the devil can take over completely. Disobedience in anything is dangerous, but disobedience that leads to all-out sin can be fatal. Anyone who wants to walk with God must not be disobedient. The Holy Spirit cannot work in an undisciplined life.

When a person comes to the place he has yielded all to the Lord, he is promised the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost has come into many hearts who have accepted Him—but then later they failed Him, grieved Him, smothered Him. Instead of letting Him blend with their spirit, they preferred their own spirit, insisted on having their own way; and finally leeches took over.

We think of leeches as blood-sucking worms three to four inches long living in water or wet earth. The word leech is also used to describe a person who clings to another for some gain, a parasite. Any leech the devil can get you to accept will hinder, hamper. Thousands of mental leeches can be clustered in a mind. They are tiny. Through the gift of discerning that works in my life, I have seen them. Never have I seen anything else like them.

I have watched how they bind the minds of people, how they hold on in clusters. If a person could look into the mirror and see what is there, he would start screaming in horror. Only through the Word of God can you find what binds your mind, what leeches are there. When a person is full of the Holy Spirit, there is a wonderful blend of the personality of the Holy Spirit and their own personality.

Self is put down, completely under control. The wonderful fruit of the Spirit, temperance, or self-control, is produced one hundred percent. The Holy Spirit knows that His fruit is a must if a person is to please God in all things. Unkind, ungodly thoughts grieve the Spirit. Cruel words in the home grieve the Holy Spirit. Some have used so many unkind words that the Holy Spirit has departed, saith the Lord.

If you are disgruntled, hard to get along with, hard to deal with, the Spirit is grieved. Gossiping, finding fault with others grieve the Holy Spirit. Some people constantly accuse others of wrongdoing.

God despises a faultfinding spirit; it grieves the Holy Spirit. Faultfinders are not yielding to the Spirit. How can you have joy in the Holy Ghost? Bringing up the past of people who have put it under the blood grieves the Holy Spirit. A past put under the blood is one not even God looks at.

No one else has the right to re-examine or talk about it. Blaming others started in the Garden of Eden. When God asked Adam if he had eaten of the forbidden tree, Adam blamed Eve: The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat Genesis Adam was stronger than the woman; he was made first and had the strength of Heaven to use.