Are you Sure you Have the Holy Spirit? [44]

Host: TJ Freeman

Summary: In this episode of Back to Rurality, rural pastor TJ Freeman discusses how to confidently know if the Holy Spirit lives within you. TJ addresses common misconceptions about spiritual experiences, Bible knowledge, and Christian duties. He emphasizes that true saving faith is found in trusting Jesus Christ alone. TJ explains that the presence of the Holy Spirit in a believer's life is evidenced by increasing qualities like love, joy, peace, and other fruit of the Spirit mentioned in Galatians 5. Additionally, TJ talks about the importance of having a healthy local church and encourages listeners to pray for congregations in rural areas. 

Connect with Us:

• Website: backtorurality.com
• Social Media: Facebook
• Email: tj@brainerdinstitute.com

Transcript

Do you have the Holy Spirit living inside of you? How are you supposed to know how to answer that question? Do you have to have some really? Amazing spiritual experience. Do you have to have some kind of special knowledge about the Bible? Do you need to always be out witnessing? How are you supposed to know if God's spirit lives inside you?

If you've ever had that question, then stay tuned because that's what we're talking about on this episode of Back to Rurality.

Well, hello, my name is TJ Freeman and I am a rural pastor, which means that just like you, I live in the middle of nowhere, a place that I really love to be because according to God, there are actually no places that don't matter.

There's no place in God's mind that's the middle of nowhere. You are at the center of God's will for your life right where you live, and God means to use you and other Christians like you to glorify himself in that place so that it truly is the middle of somewhere very important for the display of God's glory.

I'm also the host of this podcast. I wanna thank you for tuning in to listen. I don't know why you decided to listen today, but I can tell you why I decided to record today. This podcast was born out of a recognition that there are many Christians living in rural places who do not have easy access to a healthy church.

So there's a good chance that if you're listening, you live somewhere where there's just not a healthy church present. But you want to think about what it means for you to be faithful as a Christian who lives in a place like that. So that's what this podcast is all about. I don't mention this enough, but if you go back and listen to episodes three through about 24, 23, or 24, you will find a 21 day reset.

You see how I, um. My math skills are not great. So whatever three plus 21 is, it is clearly 24. So three to 24 rural reset. It's kind of like a course. That would be kind of a, it feels cheap to call it Christianity one oh one because you know more than a 1 0 1 level class about what it means to be a Christian.

But it does go through the fundamentals or the basics of the faith, and I would just love, if you've not gone back to listen to those, if it would encourage you. I would recommend going back and just spending some time listening through those. Today though, we are talking about what it means to know with confidence that God's spirit is living inside of you.

And this is a really important thing for you to know because the Bible teaches in Romans chapter eight that God's spirit testifies with our spirit, that we are actually his, that we're children of God, that we belong to Him. In other words, that we're Christians. So you want to know that God's spirit is in you testifying that you truly belong to God.

'cause there are a lot of people who are confused about what it means to actually follow God. So the first point that I wanna make here as if I were preaching is that you need to know whether or not you have God's spirit because that is a confirmation of your faith. And if your faith proves to be invalidated, when you stand before Jesus for judgment, you're going to hear the words that Jesus talked about in Matthew Chapter seven.

Depart from me. I never knew you, you worker of iniquity. So there are gonna be people who come to Jesus at the time of their death and they say, Lord, Lord, you know, we want to enter the kingdom of heaven. And Jesus is gonna say, no, you're not actually what you think you are. You're not actually a follower of Christ.

You've not surrendered your life and your heart to me. You've not been redeemed through the blood of Christ. That comes by faith or confidence in the work that Jesus did on your behalf. The reason that some people are going to feel that way is we tend to accept either the feelings that we have inside about God. Or what someone else told us about God or what is just kind of a cultural assumption about God as true. And if you've grown up in rural America, there's a good chance that you have a general belief in God. Lots of people do. That's why God shows up in country music.

That's why people talk about the man upstairs. That's why if there's an accident in your community and somebody posts about it on social media, everyone says they're praying. There's a general belief in God that a lot of people mistake for saving faith, but the Bible tells us that the demons believe in God and they shudder.

So just believing in God is not what saves you. Just believing in anything earnestly also is not going to save you. You have to believe in Christ alone. Jesus said, no one comes to the Father, but by me. So you can't get to God by believing there's a man upstairs. You can't get to God by labeling something Jesus.

And determining yourself what your God is like, but you call him Jesus, therefore, you think you're good. It's not like that. You need to trust in Jesus as he revealed himself through the pages of scripture, Jesus said, if you wanna follow after him, you have to deny yourself. Take up a cross and truly follow him.

He told his followers, if you wanna follow after me, you gotta get ready to suffer. As I have suffered, the servant shouldn't think he should experience any less suffering than the master. And this begins with you recognizing that you actually have sinned against God. And when God judges you, he'll be right to punish you eternally in health for your sin.

You have to believe that about your sin to become a Christian. Because that's what God says about your sin. And if you disagree with him, you are denying the words of the one who created you for his glory. So you've gotta come to grips with that, which is kind of horrifying to actually realize that you deserve an eternity in hell, and that would be God's just action.

In response to the way that you've lived. Man, that's, that's heavy. Do people still say that's heavy? I wonder what the, uh, newest generation would say. I don't know. They have a word for it though. Anyway. You start there, you realize the weight of your sin and you turn to Jesus who said , I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Jesus is saying that there is a death that comes as a result of sin physically, but you will be raised to eternal life just as he has been raised, if you believe in him.

And what you need to believe in is the reality of his payment for your sin on the cross. Jesus dies for you and makes an atonement because on the cross, the father pours out his wrath as a punishment for sin on his own son Jesus. And the wrath of God goes onto Christ, in payment for your sin.

So it's like your sin is there with Jesus on the cross as the Father punishes him and the righteousness of Christ. You know, his perfect life is applied to you as a credit to your account. So your sin goes to Jesus. Jesus' righteousness goes to you, and now by believing that, that you've been cleansed through the blood of Christ, you are free from sin.

But you are not free to just do whatever you want. You have been redeemed to do what you were created to do, and that is to bring glory to God who made you for his glory. Jesus restores your relationship with the father. So that you can indeed have a relationship with him and do the things that he's called you to do.

You're gonna need some help to do that though, because in this life, we still have the flesh to wrestle with, and how is the flesh overcome? Through the presence of the Holy Spirit. So that was a long way of me getting to the fact that it's possible that you believe in God, but don't have the Holy Spirit, which means that you're not a Christian.

Just believing in God is not enough. You must believe in Christ and what he has done for you as the only hope of your salvation. You must have turned to him by way of repentance, asking him to forgive your sins, and then by way of submission following after him for the rest of your life. When you become a Christian, you receive the Holy Spirit.

The truth is illuminated so that you understand that everything I just said as my own little summary from the Bible, as you read it in the Bible, you see, yes, this is true. I see this, I believe this. I'm trusting in this. And God's word begins to come alive to you in ways that it could not before because you didn't have the illumination.

That comes through the presence of God's spirit who dwells inside you. You then begin to show evidence of fruit that the Holy Spirit produces in the life of every Christian. You can read about these in Galatians chapter five. There's actually a contrast there where there are the deeds of the flesh, the bad things that we do in our flesh.

Pretty nasty list. And then there is the fruit of the spirit, by the way. It's not fruits of the spirit. The fruit of the spirit is singular and it has various aspects. What are those aspects? Things like love and joy and peace and gentleness and faithfulness, self-control, et cetera. You can read the list for yourself.

The point that I wanna make is that when you have the Holy Spirit living inside you, you should see increasing evidence of those characteristics, those things that his fruit produces. You should be growing in love. Love for God, love for neighbor, love for the people around you. You should be growing in joy.

I shared a little about this on Sunday with the congregation I pastor. And talked about the way that one of the most beautiful places to see Christian joy on display is at a funeral. Seems like a weird place to have joy. It's a place of mourning, but there is a delight in knowing that a believer is absent from the body and present with the Lord.

It his goal, the thing he was living for, he now has and that is just so sweet. It's why we would never wish a believer back from the dead, no matter how much we love them and wish they were still here. There's a joy in knowing that God's doing that in us as we work through trials in this life. James tells us to consider them joy because we know that God is leading us to steadfastness and maturity.

So the things we actually want, God is giving us through some difficult circumstances that refine us in a way nothing else could. There's a joy there and you, you increase in your joy. The longer you know the Lord and and joy through trial, joy at a funeral, those kinds of things. Those are good evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit living inside you.

There's an abiding peace, a peace that passes all understanding. Though the world is falling apart, you have a confidence in God who's sitting on the throne, not even breaking a sweat. In Jesus who's interceding for you in the presence of His Holy Spirit who's helping you. So. You can know that you have the holy Spirit inside you as you look for not your perfect behavior, not some performance on your part, but as you look at the evidence of God's spirit changing you to be more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, more patient, more good.

I know that sounded weird. You should just say better grammatically, but goodness is one of the characteristics of the fruit of the spirit, so you should see more goodness. In your life, there's a pattern of life that looks different as a believer from the pattern of life you lived before Christ.

And again, it's not your performance, you're looking at it is the presence of God's Holy Spirit as he produces good fruit in you. He has gifted you in some way. You are spiritually gifted for the building up of the body. That's another thing. And by the way, if you are living in a rural place where you don't have easy access to a healthy church, you may not be seeing this play out like you would if you were just in a, a healthy church in your community, which is one of the reasons you need to be praying regularly that the Lord will raise up a congregation in your town or your region.

But if you are in a church at all. You're around other believers and you have a part to play for the building up of the body there, and it's the Holy Spirit who enables you to play that part. It is a spirit-filled, spirit driven kind of a function that takes place within the body of Christ so that Jesus builds this whole thing up in a way that demonstrates the glory of God all the way to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

So when you wonder, do I have the Holy Spirit? Don't look at like what weirdos on TV are doing. YouTube videos of somebody lengthening somebody's leg as if that were like the ultimate healing. Don't look at, you know, well, it seems like, you know, speaking in tongues is, is thing, and I'm not doing that.

There was a time for that. That was a way that the Holy Spirit was made visible. The presence of the Holy Spirit and the life of a believer was made visible. But we have the completed word of God today. Things don't function in the same way, but there is evidence that you see of God's spirit living inside of a believer.

That is the way that the spirit testifies with their spirit, that they belong to God. That is the way that they show the fruit of the spirit in their life. And that's just demonstrated in all kinds of special ways in the life of the local church. So if you don't have a local church in your community, would you just keep praying hard, that God will raise up a congregation there and that he'd even use you to be a part of it?

And I'd love to talk to you about that. So if you ever wanna reach out, my email is just tj@Brainerdinstitute.com, several of you have been reaching out to ask questions. I love that. Send them in. Maybe I'll even bring up some of them here on the podcast. So what did we cover today? We looked at the fact that there are a lot of beliefs that people think are saving faith, that really aren't.

There's only one belief that saves you, that is in the blood of Jesus Christ as the atonement for sin. Trusting in in what Jesus did through his death, burial, and resurrection as your hope of salvation. You're following after Christ. You've denied yourself, taken up a cross, and you're following after him by faith.

Christ alone. That he is the only way to salvation. And then we've realized that when you are saved, the God gives you his spirit that works in you to illuminate the truth, to testify with your spirit, that you belong to God, and to help you walk in the truth and to show fruit of the spirit.

These are the things you need. You know, I don't like to introduce new things at the end because, well, that's just terrible form, but I'm gonna do it now because this thought just occurred to me, and I didn't plan to say this, but I struggled for years with assurance of salvation because I didn't understand that Romans eight passage well, about what it means for the spirit to testify with my spirit.

If you're wrestling with that, you need to really go talk to your pastor. If you don't have a pastor, I'd be more than happy to talk to you, but I don't know you. And I'm just gonna point you back to similar scriptures, like what I've been talking about in this episode. But the way that God helped me to move through that was to stop looking at my performance.

And to start looking, do I see God producing his fruit in me? And that's what I just wanna encourage you to do. It's going to be imperfect on your part because you still do have to deal with the flesh. Part of what makes Heaven so sweet is the fact that you'll be freed from the flesh and never again will you have to wrestle with following God or following after your own heart. Or the guilt and shame you feel as a result of sin, or the questions you have about what it means to really honor him. You'll be free from that. You'll be free to just walk in accordance with God's perfect will every day without any challenge to that.

That's amazing. For now, you have to fight the flesh and you'll see some evidence of God's fruit growing in you as you do that day by day for his glory. It's kind of a stressful thing to think about, isn't it? If you don't have the Holy Spirit, you don't have saving faith, and you will not enter into the rest that Christ has prepared for those who follow after him, and that can cause you to lose sleep.

Just let that drive you to scripture. Let it drive you to prayer and let it drive you to turn to Christ as your only hope, and trust him with your salvation as you follow after Him by faith for his glory. Once more, if you want to reach out to me, it's just tj@brainerdinstitute.com. This podcast has been a part of the Ministry of the Brainerd Institute for Rural Ministry, and we wanna see healthy churches in every rural community in America.

Thanks for joining us in that battle. For now, though, let's get back to life, back to rurality.