Hello everyone. Welcome back to another Deeper Waters blog. As you should know by now if you’ve been reading regularly, we’ve been going through the doctrine of the Trinity. We’re in the Pauline epistles now and we’re in the book of Ephesians. We’ve spent much of the time covering the deity of Christ, but all good Trinitarians know that you need the deity of the Holy Spirit as well. For that, we have the 30th verse of the fourth chapter of the book. Let’s take a look at it now.
30And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
I’m well familiar with this phrase. We had a preacher at our church preach three sermons on this verse and we kept hearing the phrase about grieving the Holy Spirit of God. He’s a great guy and a good preacher, but after that time, I thought I’d scream if I heard that phrase again.
Well I guess I’ll have to scream at myself now.
Paul is talking about righteous living and self-control. All of these are aspects of the Christian life in which we are to live as members of the body building one another up to holiness so that all can attain to the fullness of Christ.
When we do sin however, it grieves the Holy Spirit of God who sealed us. Why? He is grieved because he is doing his part to present us before the Father and here in response to the work that he has done on our behalf, we are returning to our old sinful ways. In essence, we are saying we do not want to be a part of that body. We do not want to live like redeemed people.
Now I don’t comment on secondary issues, but I will say that I do not believe anyone is saying that one sin means that the Holy Spirit goes away and lets you be on your own. No one think in saying this that I’m saying that if you commit one sin, then the Holy Spirit will remove himself from you.
Notice that we grieve the Holy Spirit. The point is that you do not grieve a force, as the Witnesses teach the Holy Spirit is. You grieve a person. The Holy Spirit has emotions in a divine sense. I say in a divine sense due to my view on the impassibility of God and that he does not experience emotions the way we do.
It is also our sin that does this and this is done for every Christian. Every Christian is warned that their sin grieves the Spirit of God. This isn’t an isolated and individual case and we have no reason to believe that Paul could only say this to the Ephesian church and no other church. Every Christian around the world can grieve the Holy Spirit of God.
We Christians today are in the same position and we should see our sin so seriously. We take it as a light matter when it really grieves the heart of God that in all that he did to deliever us from the bondage to that sin, we so often are the proverbial dogs that return to our vomit.
Today and into the future Christian, remember that a recognition of who God is also implies a recognition of the holiness he values. Don’t grieve the Spirit.
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