And question number one, if you're following along, question number one, where was Elisha when God called him? What was he doing? Elisha? Farming. He was farming, correct. Plowing with oxen. I think it was 12 yoke. Good. How long did Moses stay in a cloud on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments? 40 days and 40 nights, that is correct. Three, who came down from the Mount with Moses after he received the Ten Commandments written by the finger of God? Who went up partway and then? Joshua. If you said Joshua, you said correctly. What is the first commandment with promise? Bring your mom and dad, correct. Number five, what was the town the two, what was torn in two at the death of Jesus. Middle of Temple, who complained to the Lord that he was slow of speech? Moses. What did Lazarus the beggar wish to eat from the rich man's table? Crumbs. How many named half-brothers did Jesus have? Four is correct, four is correct. Four. In which New Testament book is a Christian's armor listed? Ephesians. What happened to the waters of Moriah when Moses put a tree into them? Sweetened. What woman led an army to battle? Deborah. And finally, where was Saul going when a light shined from heaven and the Lord spoke to him? which is also known as the, what's its claim to fame, Damascus? It's the longest continuously habited city in the world, Damascus, Syria. Pretty good, all right. Very good, actually. So we're going right to our lesson, and I thought, how about, if you would help me out here, I would like five quick facts that we know about the spirit of God. Okay, so he has emotions. Come back here now. Pardon? He indwells believers. That is correct. Pardon? He's God. He's God, okay. And what else? He leads us, he is God, he indwells believers. Is he a person? Does he have emotions? Does he have intellect? Does he have a will? Yes. Is he equal with the father and son? Will we ever see him? No. Every single believer or just selected believers, do you have to pray for him to come into your life? No, when you receive Christ as Savior, he comes in and he is the comforter promised by the Savior. If you have your lesson open, and if you've gotten a little chuckle from the pastor's difficulties, I've worked all day today making sure everything was charged, and all three, everything would work correctly. However, it has not happened that way. So the Holy Spirit, there's a lot of misconceptions about the Holy Spirit, as you well know. Listen to some people believe, this is now a doctrinal statement of a church, There is no mechanical procedure involved in receiving the Holy Spirit. It is a gift given by God to an open-hearted and hungry believer. It is not necessary to have a deep theological understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit to receive it. Now, baptism of the Holy Spirit is different than receiving the Holy Spirit. So we are all, if you would, Now, there are the Pentecostal denominations that would say baptism is when we speak in tongues, and that's the first time you really receive the Spirit. But the Bible teaches... See, that would be difficult for us because the Pentecostal movement started about 1900. And so all the previous generations of church did not have the spirit indwelling them. And I honestly have never spoken in tongues, so I don't have the spirit indwelling me if I use that particular nuanced definition. So we're not supposed to seek this spirit, according to this. Realize that you do not have to seek or pray for a certain protracted period of time to be eligible to receive the spirit. But also realize you cannot force God to give you the Holy Spirit just by talking gibberish. God's part is to fill us. Our part is to ask. Jesus told us to keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking. Well, that is true. We are to do those things. We are to seek. But what we're seeking to be filled with the Spirit means He has all of us. So when you receive Christ as Savior, if you have done that, if you have not received Christ as Savior, the Spirit does not indwell you. But if you have, you have all the Spirit you're ever going to get. The question is, how much of you does he have? And through my Christian life, sometimes he had more than others, to be honest with you, because I wasn't walking with, the Lord does not change. His criteria and his life is always holy and just. It's me who gets the wrong direction. So God never changes. What a wonderful thing that he's immutable, he's unchangeable, and he's always correct. So if you're taking down notes, you'd actually have a note in front of you. Number one is the fact of his personality. The fact of his personality, the subject under discussion is the basic and fundamental really to foundational, because the Holy Spirit is the one person of the Trinity that has so much misinformation or so many ideas of what he really is. And so we need to know, we need to understand what the, who the Holy Spirit is. The apostles' creed, Says I believe in God the Father Almighty creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary He suffered under Pontius Pilate was crucified died and was buried. He descended to hell the third day. He rose again from the dead He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty For there he will come to judge the living and the dead and he gets the Holy Spirit and says I believe in the Holy Spirit So we have, and Jesus deserves all that, and the Father deserves that and all more, but the Spirit also, I don't wanna say he got shortchanged, but the Spirit has a great ministry. As a matter of fact, he's the one that lives in all of us, and he is to be a part of our service. He's to be part of our church services, a part of who you are, et cetera. So we find that if we believe in and confess the fact of the Holy Spirit that follows then that we must confess the fact of his personality. To deny the personality is to deny his real existence is your blank existence. It is an easy matter to fall prey to a psychological fallacy that the Holy Spirit is an it, a mere force or power or energy. And so interestingly enough, I found this regarding what people believe about the Holy Spirit, and this is under the title of Kudalini Yoga and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Many people, it says right here, many people are beginning to feel the awakening effect of the Kudalini Yoga. They feel it, but how many of us have a really clear understanding of what it is? Most of us have heard of it called the coiled snake that lies sleeping at the base of the spine until such time as it is stimulated to awaken. But what does that mean to me and you? Here are some words from various religions and traditions that mean the same thing. As kundalini yoga, which is chi, prana, rua, om, an, music of the spheres, nat of the vitas, word in the Bible, inner music, logos, vital force, teo, essence. And then finally, there is comforter. So he says the last but not the least is Holy Spirit. Do you see what the Holy Spirit and their thinking is the same as all these other religious words? He says it's not really a word so much as a power that emanates from a supreme being. We can perceive it as an inner sound, or it can also be experienced as waves of water, fire, and wind. We can sense it in touch. We can hear it in the ethers of voice. There are five forms or degrees of this spirit within every human being, and on and on and on it goes. Yes, it is. Nonsense is correct. We must ask God for this Holy Spirit and with all our hearts be willing to work along with it in our cleansing process. God promised that it would be our comforter and bring back to our minds the thing that he, Jesus, has taught us. So that is, there's so much misconception and misteaching about who the Holy Spirit is. We just saw Sunday morning that he came down at Jesus' baptism and he anointed Christ for service. So, right to our lesson here. Arius, about 300, 320 AD, taught that the Holy Spirit was merely the exerted, and here's your blank, energy of God. a heretical view, heresy simply is a teaching that goes contrary to traditional teaching. So it doesn't have to be theological, most often it is, but heresy can be, you know, you could even draw it into whatever, many other things. But Arius taught that Jesus was divine, but he was a created being. And the Council of Nicaea, 325, you had Athanasius on one side, and you had the Arius on the other side. He said he was like God, or as God, but not God. And see how heretical that is. Jesus is God. If he's not God, he didn't die as God, and we have no eternal salvation. He says that Jesus was not co-eternal or the same substance as God. Does Jesus not say I and the Father are one? John 10.30 or 3.30? John 10.30 because 3.30 is He must increase but I must decrease. He says there's a time when Jesus was not. making Jesus Christ the first creation of God. And so as you well know, Jehovah's Witnesses now teach that Christ is the first creation of the Father and not eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. So those heretical teachings have found places and still are finding places. Matter of fact, Unitarianism You're not being one. They believe that God is only one, and Christ is not God, and the Spirit is not God. There's only one God. It's a heretical teaching as well. Unitarianism, the Aryan heresy, found its work there. So there are millions who, through ignorance or unbelief, deny the personality of the Holy Spirit. So if you go to this church and they say, you know, the Holy Spirit is just one of about 50 names of other religions that mean the same thing. No. Oh, no. Oh no, there's only, we have to go back to the one, the one source that tells us about who the Holy Spirit is. And so that's what we're going to go back to. Now, if you turn to your Bibles, please, to Romans chapter eight, first of all, Romans chapter eight, we're going to find that there is a just, we want to clear this up right as we get off the bat here. Romans chapter eight, verse 16 and 26. Romans chapter 8, 16 says for us here, The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. 8.26, same chapter. Likewise, the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself. 1 Peter 1.11. 1 Peter, all the way back to the New Testament, almost to the end. 1 Peter 1.11. I want you to get hung up on this. Searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should come. Now, languages have matching pronouns. So we would say, uh, Tim got her boat. Now that's popular in today's culture. No, you say Tim got his boat. We would say Dave's bass boat, his bass boat is red. We'd say Mark's computer is very fast. We'd say Bud's dog is very large and very white. His dog. And so then if it was my wife's, my wife's favorite cat, her cat, So in the Greek language, there also is the grammatical correlation. The word pneuma is neutered, so it's really neither male or female. So grammatically speaking, the it is okay. But we understand the Him, it's a Him, it's a He. And so there's no female gods in the Bible that are true gods. So it's Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, He is. And so in case you're wondering, John chapter 16, please, we can go to write to God's word and see how, there's only three times. There's a lot of other times, far more, that talk about the Spirit being a he. John 14, 16, I will pray the Father and he shall give you another comforter that he may abide with you forever. So Father is he and Holy Spirit is he in the same verse, 14, 26 of John. But the comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you. all things and bring all things to your remembrance. John 1526. But when the comforters come whom I will send into you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth which proceeds in the Father, he shall testify of me. So there is the masculine 16 seven. 16, seven, nevertheless, I tell you the truth, it is expedient for you that I go away, for if I go not away, the comforter will not come unto you, but if I depart, I will send him unto you. And then 16, 13, 14, how be it when he, the spirit of truth has come, he will guide you into all truth, for he shall speak of himself. A plethora of times just in the Gospel of John, the Holy Spirit is referred to as a masculine, as a he. Questions on that? So the three times, so in our translation, our rendering, it's not wrong to say it because the word itself is neuter. So if I were to say libro in Spanish, libro, so I would say el libro, a masculine, our adjective, our article, el libro, or los libros. If I were to say pluma, la pluma, or los plumas, so the feminine article goes with the feminine noun. The masculine article goes with the masculine noun. If it's neuter, then you can use something other, but we understand grammatical use of words and pronouns, et cetera. All good with that? All right, three essentials of personality. Letter A, or number A, is intellect. Intellect is your blank. Romans 8, verse 27. Romans 8, verse 27. Now we're gonna look at a lot of scriptures, so you can try, I would encourage you to keep up with me if you can. I'll try to speak clearly. Intellect, a person can think and know and understand. He that searches the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. What's in the mind? So he thinks, the Holy Spirit can think, he understands. In 1426 of John, 1426, we're not gonna look at them all, but 1426 says, but the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things. So the Holy Spirit has intellect. So how can you understand the Bible? It's, you gotta read it, yes, but it's the Holy Spirit who teaches you the Bible, the Word of God. So the unbeliever, we read, the believer hears you talk about the Word of God. If they don't know Christ, they don't have the Holy Spirit teaching them and ministering with their spirits. So the intellect, the Holy Spirit has intellect. Secondly, the Holy Spirit has emotions. In 430 of Ephesians, and grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you're sealed into the day of... Well, I should probably read that. I probably combined two verses there. I know it's, and grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you're sealed into the day of redemption. Grieve not. So how do you grieve the Holy Spirit? Do you think the Holy Spirit has emotions? Does he get sad, do you think? Can he be grieved? Yes. We can resist the Holy Spirit. That would also be under the will, but it says, quench not the Spirit. And we find it in 751 of Acts, resisting the Spirit. So there are the emotions. Does God have emotions? Does God get angry? Yes. Zephaniah 3.17, he laughs, rejoiced over us with singing. He's angry. Matter of fact, if you study the word anger and angry in the Bible and Old Testament especially, most of the time it refers to God angry at sin. Anger, yes. Righteous, and by the way, his anger is a righteous indignation. My anger, 99% of the time, is not a righteous indignation. It's at the cats, or at the drivers, or at something else, or the co-worker, and of course, no, I never get angry with my co-workers ever at all, but those are kind of things. Actually, I don't get angry with my co-workers. Maybe a little frustrated sometimes, but never angry. But the Holy Spirit has emotions, and thirdly, he has will. you His capacity and determination to bestow gifts. Who gave you your spiritual gifts? He gives them severally as He wills. He has the desire. He has a purpose. He forbidding Paul in Acts 16. He calls men into the gospel ministry and sends them forth to preach. Does the Holy Spirit have a will for you? Yes. What is His primary purpose? Last time, talk about it. What is the Holy Spirit's primary purpose regarding the Son? S-O-N. It's to glorify the Son. That's what he does. The Son obeys the Father, and the Spirit glorifies the Son. It's interesting because of all of the three of the Godhead, the one who gets the most probably publicity and airtime is the Holy Spirit, and he's just the opposite. He would be the one behind the scenes and glorifying the Lord, the Christ. So, his intellect, emotions, and will. So, he has a personality. Now, that's just part of what it means to be a person. Because of this, it does not make sense to say the Holy Spirit is nothing more than an influence. I'm telling you, in 1978, when the Star Wars movie came out, I'm telling you, the force, or the yin-yang, or the good, the dark side. I can do it one time because we have a guy named Luke that works with us now. Oh, Darth Vader, I mean, I saw it, the action has a new blade on one of their plows called, was it, something, I can't remember, anyway, it was pretty cute. But that was, oh, we got the force, and so, may the force be with you, so Steve goes out there, and he's being good, and he tunes into the light side of the force, or what is it called, the white, it's not called the white side, it's called the, The good sign? Then he can do some good things. But you don't want to turn toward... It's like that force is either good or evil, and it's just an exertion of power. How many people have been truly swayed by that and think that's really true? The Holy Spirit is... He has a lot of power. He's omnipotent. But He's a person. One God, three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So not only is the personality the fact of deity, secondly, The fact of his deity, the fact of his personality was one, the fact of his deity. So if we say a deity is, of course, divine. He's not just a person, he's a divine person, he is God. The Word of God presents clearly the truth that the Holy Spirit, along with the Father and Son, possess all the essential attributes of deity. D-E-I-T-Y is your blank both times there. We think of a trinity or tri-unity. One, but more than one, the uniprolonoun. So first of all, this characteristic of deities is eternality. Now, we have eternal life. God has eternality. He always has been. We have, at this point in time, from my creation by God, I have, and since I've trusted Christ as Savior, I have everlasting life. But I was not always. The angels weren't always. God created the angels. Only God, Father, Son, and Spirit are those who have already been for eternity. So eternality. The Father's eternal, Deuteronomy 33, 22. And the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So the Son, the Word, who I think are inseparable, John 1, 1. And then the Spirit. In Hebrews 9, 14. Listen to this clear, clear statement. It says for us in Hebrews 9.14, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God. So Christ, eternal spirit, and God the Father in one verse right there. So if you're going to look in vain, to be honest with you, to find the word Trinity in our scriptures, it's not there, but the exact English word is not there, but the truth and teaching is all over the scripture that there's God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Then the baptismal formula in Matthew chapter 28, 19, Let's read that for just a moment. There's five, by the way, there's five of the Great Commission Acts will be the fifth part, 28, 19. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. If he was just a force or if he was just a third I'll say a third world, a third world part. No, no, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and they're all co-equal in authority and power. Now, the Father, we think of him as the head, and the Son glorifies, or worships, or sorry, he serves the Father, obeys the Father, and the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son. But as far as attributes, they're all the same. Again, we can't understand that with our finite minds, but that's what the Bible teaches. So it's unnatural to regard the Spirit as anything less than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So eternality, secondly, is omniscience, omni, the Latin for all, science, it means knowledge, is your blank, all knowledge, thus God is all-knowing. So how does that differ from pantheism? What's between the omniscience of God and pantheism that says that everything is what? God, pantheism, everything's God. No, omniscience is God knows everything and omnipresence, he's everywhere at once. That's far different than pantheism because then you're gonna have the PETA folks and you're gonna have everybody else, the tree folks and the grasshopper folks and say, well, everything's God and everything's equal, no. We have one God in three persons and he is omniscient, he's all-knowing, he knows everything. If there was anything God did not know, he would cease to be God. If there was anything God did not know, He would cease to be God. So the Spirit knows all things in 1 Corinthians 2. We've heard it before in John 14, 26. He will teach, is your blank, teach all things. Isaiah 11, 2, He is called the Spirit of knowledge. And in John 14, 17, He is the Spirit of truth. Spirit of truth. Think about just for a moment, if God was not 100% truthful, So you'd be like, wow, I don't know if that's really true. And then if you'd happen to, and if God wasn't, and here he is, I hate to even, it's blasphemous even to think this way, but if he wasn't, he was truthful 99% of the time. And you found out that one time, and then where goes your trust? You lie to me once, I'm never, I'm gonna start doubting, if you lie to me twice, I'm probably never gonna trust you much ever again. Our God, the Spirit, He's the Spirit of truth. We should rejoice in that. That's what holds a society together. It's the truth. It's foundational. The truth of God's Word. It's ontology. It's how the truth is that we have a male and female, and that is the truth. It really is. That's just the way it is. We maybe want to push those boundaries, but the truth is, you're the one or the other. And omnipotence, we'll close with this, unlimited power. The majority of evidence of divine omnipotence is witnessed in the creation of the universe. In the beginning, God created Elohim, a uniplural noun, that's your blank there, a plural noun, una, one, plural, more than one. So it's one times one times one equals one. So three people, three gods, three persons, I'm sorry, in the Godhead, the Trinity, and they all work together. And one, two, it says, and the Spirit moved upon the face of the water. So he was there in creation. And Job 33, involved in the creation of man. Is the Holy Spirit involved in every single person who gets saved? Yes. Will the Holy Spirit, now I'm not trying to trick you, after the rapture, will the Holy Spirit still be involved in every single person that gets saved? Yes. Now, we, it says the Spirit is going to be removed in the church. But you cannot be saved, whether pre-rapture, post-rapture, whenever, and without Christ and the Holy Spirit and the Father all being involved. Even though the church is gone, there will be, some have said, Tim LaHaye said, there will be more saved and the tribulation time than all the 1900 or 20,000 years of history. So I don't know if that's true or not, but there's going to be a lot of people who come to know Christ as Savior. Matter of fact, in Chapter 9 or Chapter 7 of Revelation, they're around the altar. Those who have been beheaded for the cause of Christ. The Holy Spirit will still have to be involved in any salvation ever. That's just what the Bible teaches. Because, what do we know? If you don't have the Holy Spirit indwelling you, you're not truly born again. And there's not going to be a different venue of how to get saved during the tribulation time. It's the same Spirit, the same God, the same salvation message that we've had before the rapture of the church, and the church is going home, to after the rapture. So the Spirit, He's a person. And He's God. He's God. God of very God. In 325, the Council of Nicaea made the statement that Jesus is God of very God. Not like, not just similar to, but no. He's God of very God. And that settled it. And much of the church thinking, now obviously there's people who didn't believe that and still don't. But we have the, pardon? They're all three R, yes. But the question is that in 325 was that Jesus was, he was a created being, yes, close to God, but not, no. And they said, no, no, he's God, a very God. The Holy Spirit is God, a very God, and the Father is God, a very God. And they worked together to offer us salvation in the person of Christ and in the ministry of the Spirit. It's a wonderful how that all works together, isn't it? It's amazing. We will learn about that for eternity. Let us pray together. Lord, we're just thankful for the teaching of your word. We're thankful for the Holy Spirit who works in our hearts and lives. And Lord, he does convict of sin for sure. And Lord, we need the conviction. Because without conviction, we probably just tuttle off on our own ways and continue on our own disobedience often. So we thank you for the teaching ministry of the Spirit. We thank you for the comforting ministry of the Spirit. And so, Holy Spirit, help, I pray that we do not grieve or resist or quench your working in our lives. May you be sensitive to your wooing and moving and conviction. And ask all these things, in Jesus' name I pray, amen.