I am to speak on the, if ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another comforter, that he may abide with you forever. Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him, but ye know him, for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. Verse 26, "...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, whatsoever I have said unto you." Now, in this series of sermons, sometimes I will use the words, the Holy Spirit, sometimes I will use the words, the Holy Ghost. They mean exactly and precisely the same thing. Their old Anglo-Saxon word, geist, has been turned into our English, ghost, and it means spirit. So when we say the Holy Ghost, we're saying in the old Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan English, the Holy Geist, the Holy Spirit. So it makes no difference which I say, I mean the same thing. Let me start by reminding you that about a half a century ago, the liberals committed a great blunder. And that blunder was the neglect or the denial of the Deity of Jesus. They either didn't talk about it at all, or else they explained the Deity of Jesus away. They denied or explained away or neglected to mention his lordship over the Church. Now, this was a stupid and a dangerous blunder. And it brought inner blindness to thousands, and spiritual decay and death to greater thousands. Now, in more recent times, oh, say within forty years back, the evangelical Christians, I suppose you know what I mean when I say evangelical Christians. I mean the gospel Christians, such as you and I, people who believe the Bible, Bible That's what I mean by the evangelical Christians. I mentioned the word evangelical Christian down in the convention of doctors in Wheaton last week. And afterward, a fine, distinguished-looking gentleman came down to the front. He said, I am a Methodist, and I don't know what you mean by evangelical. Would you tell me what you mean? So I explained to this good Methodist brother who didn't know the difference between an evangelical and a modernist. what the difference was in what I meant by what I had said. He thanked me and was very courteously and walked away. If evangelical Christianity has committed a great blunder over the last years, it has been the neglect or the denial of the Deity of the Holy Spirit. I think I ought to modify that, for I doubt very much whether any evangelical ever denied the Deity of the Holy Spirit, but we certainly neglect him. And, of course, we have neglected his lordship within the Church. Now, the result of this, of course, has been—this failure to honor the Holy Spirit has been many, the results have been many. For one has been that the fellowship of the Church has degenerated into a social fellowship with a mild religious flavor. I want you to know something about me. It isn't important, but I just want to say it while I'm here, while I have the time that I either want God or I don't want anything at all to do with religion. You never get me interested in the old maid social club with a little bit of Christianity thrown in to give it respectability. I either want it all or I don't want any. I want God or I am perfectly happy to go out and do something else. I think the Lord had something like that in mind when he said, I wish thou wert hot or cold because thou art neither hot or cold. I will spew thee out of my mouth." Another result of the failure to honor the Holy Ghost is that so many non-spiritual and unspiritual and anti-spiritual features have been brought into the Church. If the average Church couldn't run on a hymn book and a Bible, we just wouldn't be able to do it. You know, the Church started out with a Bible, and then it got a hymn book, and for years they had a hymn book and a Bible. Now we have to have all kinds of trucks, a lot of people, and they couldn't serve God at all without at least one van load of equipment to keep them happy. And all this stuff, this fellowship. Now the attraction that we have to win people and keep them coming It may be fine, it may be elevated, it may be cheap, it may be degrading, it may be coarse, it may be artistic, it all depends upon who is running the show. But because the Holy Spirit is not the center of attraction and the Lord is not the one who is in charge, we bring in all sorts of anti-scriptural and unscriptural claptrap to keep the people happy and keep them coming. The horrible part about that isn't that that is true, but the horrible part about it is that it needs to be at all. That the great woe is not the presence of religious toys and trifles, but the necessity for them that the presence of the Eternal Spirit is not in our midst. The most important one that could possibly be here tonight is the Holy Spirit. And the tragedy and woe of the hour is that we neglect him, and then in order to make up for his absence, we have to do something to keep our own spirits up. I said in Chicago, whenever I talk this way, wherever I go, you know, I preach this way in Moody Church and everywhere I go. Some like it, some don't, but they come back. And I said this in our church in the south side of Chicago, Suddenly, in an impulse, I said, there are churches so completely out of the hands of God that if the Holy Ghost withdrew from them, they wouldn't find it out for three months. And then the next day or so afterward, a telephone rang, and a woman's voice said, Mr. Tozer, I am not a member of your church, I am a member of a church On the north side, if you know anything about that great city, you know that being on the north side is like being in another state. It's almost like being in Buffalo from here, you know, just way off there. And she said, I was down to your church last night and I heard you say that there are churches where the Holy Spirit should desert them, they'd never find it out. And she said, Mr. Tozer, I want you to know that that's what happened in our church. Her voice was very tender and broken, and there was no criticism or censoriousness at all. And I tried to console her. I said, well, maybe it's just that he is grieved, or maybe that he is not given the place. No, she said, it's past that, Mr. Tozer. She said, we have so consistently rejected him in our church, and it's a gospel church, we have so consistently rejected him that he is gone, he's no longer there. Now, I don't know whether she's right, I doubt whether she is right. I don't believe the Spirit of God ever leaves a church completely, but he can, like the Savior who is asleep on the behinder part of the ship, he can go, so to speak, to sleep and not make himself known and to let us get along without him for years. Now, I want to ask, who is the Holy Spirit? That's the subject for tonight. First of all, what is the Holy Spirit? And here I'm going to ask you to shake your head real hard and wake up some of the cells that haven't had a good workout since you got out of college or high school, because I'm going to ask you to think with me about something that's a little bit off the beaten track. You know how our trouble is. A fellow came to church one time, a fine-looking fellow, but obviously he wasn't too well-educated. I told her, I said, I'm a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, but I confess I'm getting sick and weary of all these religious cliches that I hear. He meant cliches, of course. And these religious cliches that we have, these cliches, just repeating the same old cliché over and over again. Well, one of the things I do is not do that. And some people are startled and run and never come back, but others come to see this great and wonder how it is you can say something and not sound like a preacher in saying it. Well, I've worked on that all my life. I've been a preacher since I was 18, but I sure tried hard not to sound like one. Well, what is the Holy Spirit? Well, in the first place, Spirit is another mode of being. Now, shake your head real hard on that. Spirit is another mode of being than matter. You know, we'd bump this pulpit. I won't do it because it would spoil the tape. You can pick a thing up and bounce it around. That matter, you're a composite of matter. That head you have on there and that body, that matter. But you know that's only one mode of existence. There's another, and that's at least another, and that's spirit. And the difference between matter and spirit is that matter possesses weight and size and color and extension in space. It can be measured and weighed and it has form. but the Holy Spirit is not material, therefore he does not have weight, nor dimension, nor shape, nor extension in space. Now, one power of Spirit is to penetrate matter, to penetrate things, all substances. Your spirit, for instance, dwells in your body somewhere, and it penetrates your body and doesn't hurt the body. It's in there penetrating because it's another form. You know, when Jesus had risen from the dead, and he was no more mere matter. He came into a locked door where it was locked and shut, and he came evidently through the wall somehow, and he managed to penetrate and get into that room without unlocking it. Now, he couldn't have done that before he died, but he did it afterward. And spirit, then, is another kind of substance. It's different from material things. And it can penetrate personality. Your spirit can penetrate your personality. One personality can penetrate another personality. The Holy Spirit can penetrate your personality, your spirit. The Bible talks in 1 Corinthians, yes, 1 Corinthians, about the no man knowing the things of God save the spirit of the man. No man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of the man that's in him. No man knows the spirit things of God except the Spirit of God, which reveals them. So the Spirit of God can penetrate the spirit of man. Now, I want to just say what the Holy Spirit is not. The Holy Spirit is not enthusiasm. Some people get enthusiasm, they imagine it's the Holy Spirit. Why, we have people down in our part of the country that can get worked up over a song until they're actually sent. You know, they say they get sent just by a psalm. And they imagine that's the Spirit. Not necessarily, because those same people, there's a lot of them, go out and live just like the world. And the Holy Spirit never enters a man and then lets him live like the world. You can be sure of that. And incidentally, that's the reason most people don't want to be filled with the Holy Spirit. They want to live the way they want to live and have the Holy Spirit as a bit of something extra. as you might have a diamond stick pin or something very beautiful on your clothing. They want the Holy Ghost to be added, but the Holy Spirit will not be an addition. The Holy Spirit must be Lord, or he won't come at all. But that's for another sermon. Now, the Holy Spirit is a person. I want you to get that. You can spell that with capital letters if you want to. The Holy Spirit is a person. He's not enthusiasm. He's not courage, nor energy, nor the personification of all good qualities, like Jack Frost is the personification of cold weather, and Santa Claus the personification of wanting to give somebody a tie. That's a personification. But the Holy Spirit is not a personification of anything. The Holy Spirit is a person, just the same as you're a person. And He has all the qualities of a person. The Holy Spirit has substance, but not material substance. He has individuality. He is one being and not another. He has will, and he has intelligence, and he has feeling, and he has knowledge and sympathy and ability to love and see and think and hear and speak and desire and grieve and rejoice. He is a person, this Holy Spirit. And Jesus said, I will send him unto you, and I will not leave you comfortless, but he will come And when he has come, he will take the things of mine and show them unto you. And the most important thing in the world is that this blessed Holy Spirit is now present here in this church tonight. Jesus, you know, in his body, is at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. He enters seating for us, and he will be there until he comes again. But he said, I will send another comforter, the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, and he will be my representative, and he will be all that I am. Now, who is the Holy Spirit? I have spoken briefly on what is the Holy Spirit, and I have said he is Spirit and not matter. He is personality, he is individuality, he has intelligence and love and memory, and he can communicate with you. He can love you, and He can be grieved when you grieve Him. He can be quenched, as any friend can be shut up if you turn on Him. And if He's in your home as a guest and you suddenly turn on Him, of course, you'll be hushed into hurt silence, because you've wounded Him. And so we can wound the Holy Spirit. Now that's what He is. But who is the Holy Spirit? Well, the historic Church said that the Holy Spirit is God. Some of you who attended some of the denominations remember the Nicene Creed. That is quoted every so often. If I recall, it runs something like this, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, begotten of Him before all ages. God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life. who with the Father and Son together is worshipped and glorified." Now there's what the Creed said way back there 1,600 years ago. And then there's another Creed that was, oh, about 1,300 years ago, maybe 1,400, and that's called the Athanasian Creed. That came into being way back there when a man named Arias stood up and said that Jesus was a good man and a great man, but he wasn't God. He wasn't really divine, he was not any second person of the Trinity, and there was a man named Athanasius. He said, no, the Bible teaches that Jesus is God, and they had all kinds of controversy about it there. But he came to Athanasius and said, Athanasius, the whole world is against you on this. He said, all right then, I'm against the whole world. He didn't mind having them against him, but they had that great gathering at night, And there they formed the, out of it came the Adonisian Creed. The Nicene Creed is supposed to have been born there, but the Church Fathers got together and they thought out what the Bible had to say about the three persons of the Trinity. You know, most of us, we're so busy reading religious fiction, we never get around to it. So I thought it might be nice tonight, if I took you back about, oh, 1,300 years and And listen to our Fathers tell about who Jesus is. Well, here's what it says. There is one person of the Father and another of the Son and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is but one. The glory is equal and the majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son and such is the Holy Ghost. Now, this is what they said back in the days of Adam and They said the Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, and the Holy Ghost is uncreated. The Father is infinite, the Son is infinite, and the Holy Ghost is infinite. The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, and the Holy Ghost is eternal. And yet there are not three eternals, but one eternal. So there are not three uncreated, nor three infinite, but one uncreated and one infinite. So also the Father is almighty, and the Son is almighty, and the Holy Spirit is almighty. Yet there are not three almighties, but one almighty. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. Yet there are not three Gods, but one God. Their ears burned off, some of them had their arms torn off, some of them had lost a leg, all because they had stood for this thing, that Jesus was Lord to the glory of God the Father, and the Romans had persecuted them under Diocletian and Caligula and the rest of them. And these men were martyrs who hadn't quite died, but were maimed horribly. but old saints of God and learned scholars who knew the truth, and they came there and they wrote these things up and gave it to us for the world and for the ages. And I thank God on my knees for them." Well, not only do the historic Church say that the Holy Spirit is God, but the scriptures say that the Holy Spirit is God. And I might say this to you. that if the church said it and the scripture didn't say it, I'd reject it. I wouldn't believe an archangel if he came to Toronto with a wing spread at 12 feet, shining like an atom bomb, just at the moment it goes off, if he couldn't give me chapter and verse. I want to know it's here in the book. I am not a traditionalist. And anybody comes to me and says, it's traditional, I say, all right, very nice. Interesting if true, but is it true? Give me verse and chapter. So I want to know now, were these old brethren, when they said all this, were they telling the truth? Well, listen to what the scriptures have to say. The scripture says he's God, gives to him the attributes that belong to God and the Son and the Father. For instance, 139th Psalm, it says there, that whither shall I go from thy spirit, and whither shall I hide from thy presence? That is, omnipresence. Not even the devil is omnipresent, only God can claim omnipresence. And the psalmist attributed omnipresence to the Holy Spirit. Then in Job, he is given the power to create. Job 26 and so on, 33, says, "...by his Spirit he garnished the heavens and made the crooked serpent. He said, The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." There we have the breath. breath, the ghost, the spirit of the Almighty has given me life. So the Holy Spirit is here, said to be Creator. He issues commands, thus saith the Spirit, and only God can do that. He is called Lord in 2 Corinthians 3, and there is the baptismal formula. I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. There is the benediction, the love of God and the grace of Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghost. Now, I want to ask you something. Now, this is going to be a little shocking, maybe, but I want to ask you, if the Spirit of God was not God, if he was not God but something less, if he was a man or an angel or something else, if he just wasn't God, as some people say, then I want to ask you, if the Scriptures don't teach that he's God, I want to ask you how it would sound if I introduced here the name of, say, the archangel Gabriel or somebody. Suppose that I said, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son in St. Paul. Wouldn't that be a shocking, horrible thing? If I said, I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Virgin Mary, wouldn't that be a horrible thing? For you cannot attribute deity to St. Paul, you cannot attribute deity to the Virgin, though we honor her, for she was the mother of our Lord. The mother of our Lord's body, not the mother of the Lord's deity. For his deity had been before the foundation of the world. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and all things were made by him, and without him was nothing made that was made. And the very atoms that composed the body of his mother had been made by the Holy Lord whom she bore." But suppose that we introduced her there, or introduced Gabriel the archangel there, And we'd say, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the archangel Gabriel. Everybody would run for the door. They'd say, there's heresy in that church. It would be a horrible thing to introduce an archangel or an angel or a man in where the Holy Spirit belongs. Never, never, my brother. The Holy Spirit is God. And the most important thing here tonight is that the Holy Spirit is present. There is unseen deity present. Now, I cannot bring him here I can only tell you that he is here, that is all. I can tell you that he is present in our midst, a knowing, feeling personality. He knows how you're reacting to what I'm saying. He knows why you came. He knows what you're going to say as soon as you get out on the sidewalk. He knows how you're thinking now. He knows you're up rising and you're down sitting and understands your thoughts are far off and you can't hide from him. He's present in our midst. I will send another Comforter to you, and he will abide with you." So he's here among us. We're here met as Christians, and most of us are Christians here, and there's an invisible presence here. And we can't see him, but we know he's here. Now he is, as I have said, indivisible from the Father and the Son, and he is all God and exercises all the rights of God. And he merits all worship and all love and all obedience. That's who the Holy Spirit is. And here's a beautiful thing about the Holy Spirit. Being the Spirit of Jesus, you will find him exactly like Jesus. A lot of people have been frightened, you know, by people claiming to be filled with the Spirit and acting any way else but like the Spirit. Some people, when they say they're filled with the Spirit, they are very stern and harsh and abusive. And others do weird things, and they say that's the Holy Spirit. Well, the Holy Spirit is exactly like Jesus, just as Jesus is exactly like the Father. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father, said Jesus. And I will send you another Comforter, and he will take the things of mine, and he will show them to you. He'll demonstrate me to you. Now, what does the Holy Spirit think of babies? Well, what did Jesus think of babies? He thought of babies just what the Father did. And the Father must think wonderfully well of babies because the Son took a baby in his arms and put his hand on his little bald head and said, God bless you, and blessed the baby. Maybe theologians don't know why I did it, but I think I do, because there's nothing sweeter and softer in all the world than the top of a little bald baby's head. And Jesus put his hand on that little soft head and blessed it in the name of his Father. Well, now the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus. What does the Spirit think of babies, then? Well, the Spirit thinks of babies just exactly what Jesus did. What does the Spirit think of sick people? Well, what did Jesus think of sick people? What does the Spirit think of sinful people? What did Jesus think of the woman dragged into his presence, taken in adultery? The Spirit feels exactly the way Jesus feels about everything. He is the Spirit of Jesus, and he acts exactly the way Jesus acts. If Christ Jesus, our Lord, we could thank him here in person, if we had that old toga on and were walking quietly down the aisle, there wouldn't be anybody run from Jesus, nobody. They came to him, mothers brought their babies, the sick came, the weary came, the tired came, the dispossessed came, everybody came, because he was the most magnetic person that ever lived. Even old Frederick Nietzsche, that nihilistic German philosopher, the brought-on World Wars woman too, they tell me, he laid the foundation work for the Nazis. That old ungodly fellow, he said, I like Jesus, I love Jesus, but I hate that man Paul. He couldn't take Paul, but he said he loved Jesus. And you will not find anybody saying very much against Jesus personally, because Jesus was the most winsome, the most loving, the most kindly, the tenderest, the most beautiful character that ever lived in all the world. And you know what he was? He was demonstrating the Spirit. He was demonstrating. That's the way the Spirit is. So in all these sermons that I'm going to preach about how to be filled with the Spirit, how to walk with the Spirit, what difference does the Spirit make, and what is the promise of the Father, and how can we receive him? In all of this, I want you to think of the Spirit as cultured, gracious, loving, kind, gentle, just like our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Now, he is friendly, the Holy Spirit is friendly. We try to make him something else but friendly, but he is friendly. And because he is friendly, he may be grieved, as I said before, and we can grieve him. By ignoring him, by resisting him, by doubting him or by sinning against him, by refusing to obey him, by turning our backs on him, we can grieve the Spirit. But you know there's one thing, there must be love present before there can be grief. Let me give you an example. How long can I preach, brother? I don't want to take all your time. It's 18 after. I should be through in another five minutes, shouldn't I? Well, the Holy Spirit, I said, was friendly, and he can be grieved, and he can be grieved because he's loving. I suppose you had a seventeen-year-old son, and that son of yours began to go bad. I pray this might never happen. Thank God it didn't happen with our six. any of them, but I hope it'll never happen with any you may have or love. But suppose you had a 17-year-old boy, and he got to that age, you know, where he wanted to take things in his own hand. And suppose that he joined up with some boy you didn't know, some stranger from another part of town, and they got into trouble. And you were called down to the police station. And you went down, and here sat your boy and another boy you'd never seen in handcuffs. You know how you'd feel about it? You'd be sorry for the other boy, but you didn't love the other boy because you didn't know him. But with your own boy, your grief would penetrate your heart like a sword, for only love can grieve. And if those two boys were sent off to prison, you might pity the boy you didn't know, but you'd grieve over the boy you didn't know. Mother can grieve because she loves. If you don't love, you can't grieve. So that when the scripture says, "'Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God,' it is telling us that he loves us so much that when we insult him, he's grieved. When we ignore him, he's grieved. When we resist him, he's grieved. When we doubt him, he's grieved. But also we can please him by obeying and believing, and when we please him, he responds to us just like a pleased father responds, just like a pleased mother responds. He responds to us because he's pleased, because he loves us. Now, he that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto Avenue Road Church. The Spirit saith unto the churches, and to this church, the restoration of the Spirit to his rightful place in the church, in this church, in your life, is by all means the most important thing that could possibly take place. If you were to increase the attendance until there wasn't a place to put them, if you were to get $10,000 or $20,000 given to you, if you were to have anything that they have in churches that men want and love and put value on, and you didn't have the Holy Spirit, you might as well have nothing at all, for it is not by might nor by power, but it's by my Spirit. not by the eloquence of a man, not by good music, not by good preaching, if this might pass for some kind of preaching, but it is by the Spirit that God works His mighty work. I said this morning that we had better throw ourselves back on God, for there'll be a day when we'll have nothing but God. I didn't know when I said that, that last night around midnight, my friend Cecil Thomas got to a place suddenly where he has nothing but God, nothing. He had friends all over the world, he had a big car, he had lots of things, but now he has nothing but God and his nice little wife, nothing but God. And we'd better now, while we can, do something about it, my friends, and bring the Holy Spirit of God back into the church, back by prayer, back by obedience, back by confession, until he takes over Then there will be life and light and power and victory and joy and fruit, and it will come to us, and we can live upon a different level altogether, a level we never dreamed was possible before. Do you believe that? Oh, it's so, my friends. So I'm going to stop tonight, for all I've done is taught. I haven't given any evangelism, I've just taught tonight. What is the Spirit? Who is the Spirit? How do we know who the Spirit is? We know by the Scriptures. We know because the Church Fathers knew what the Scriptures said. And He is in our midst. But unless He is feelingly in our midst, unless He is consciously in our midst, that is, we're conscious of it, we might as well be somewhere else. Because it's possible to run a church without the Holy Spirit. That's the terrible thing. You organize it, You get a board, and a pastor, and a choir, and a lady's aide, and a Sunday school, and you get all organized. And I believe in organization. I'm not against it, I'm for it. You get organized, and then you get a pastor to turn the crank, and that's all there is to it, you know. The Holy Ghost can leave, and the pastor goes on turning the crank, and nobody finds it out for five years. Oh, what a tragedy, my brethren. What a horrible tragedy to the Church of Christ. But we don't have to have it that way. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches." Now, to this kind of preaching, having your own church is going to do one or two things. It's going to bring your action from it, in which case, as I said to somebody, I came and I can go again. Or there is going to be an eager seeking, and I believe the latter will be the case. I believe that there will be an eager seeking for better things than that we now have. So we're going to seek God together these nights. Next week, come back and tell the people about it. We'll talk about the promise of the Father and show how that promise which is for you has its roots way back into the early chapters of the scriptures and on down the years. We'll go on night after night.