One Spirit Expressing Himself Through Different Manifestations

Many times there are Christians who, although they live godly lives and love the Lord, and have repented of their sins, and have received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and have the Presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, have not received that Pentecostal experience of saturation and baptism in the Person of the Holy Spirit.

And these disciples in Ephesus whom Paul encounters in Acts chapter 19 exemplify that segment of the Christian life that has not had that experience, even though they acknowledge Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and therefore are saved, and have the Holy Spirit within them, but not in that abundant, overwhelming, and dynamic way in which God wants Him to be within them.

By the way, another passage that illustrates this very well is where the Lord Jesus Christ says: “From within those who believe in Me, rivers of living water will flow,” and the Word says that the Lord was speaking of the Spirit who was going to dwell in believers. And that idea of rivers of living water flowing from within the children of God refers to that manifest, powerful, dynamic, effervescent Presence of the Spirit of God in our lives.

God wants the Presence of His Spirit to be something dynamic, explosive, vibrant, that destroys the spirits of depression, passivity, and a kind of stagnation found in the lives of believers, and He wants the life of a Christian filled with the Holy Spirit to be a life that flows like rivers that flow and leap forth as a blessing and for the benefit of the Kingdom of God and of their own lives as well. The Christian life is a life like that; it is a dynamic life of new experiences, new revelations, perpetual growth, and we obtain that only when we have that fullness of the Holy Spirit.

One can have the Presence of the Holy Spirit like a still, peaceful lake, like a smooth surface, but through the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the Power of God infused into a believer, that placid lake can also become something that leaps forth, like a flowing river that manifests that dynamic activity of the Power of God in the believer’s life, and that is what we seek in our lives.

I believe that it is because so many people are unaware of the importance of living a life in intense and intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit that Paul writes chapters 12, 13, and 14 of First Corinthians, because I believe that here we have the most complete exposition of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s relationship with each believer and with the Church in general.

The Spirit of God guided the apostle Paul to set forth for us there a series of teachings about life in relationship with the Holy Spirit that is absolutely essential, and I want to devote a few meditations to these passages in First Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 before bringing this series on the baptism of the Holy Spirit to a close. That is why I have taken so much time to set forth this doctrine, and I hope you appreciate the importance of what I am setting forth here; what I am teaching here is very essential doctrine and teaching.

So in chapter 12 of First Corinthians Paul says: “Now, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant about spiritual gifts.” Look at what it says here. The Holy Spirit, through the apostle Paul, says: my fellow believers, I do not want you to be ignorant of matters having to do with spiritual gifts.

In the original Greek, the word used is neumaticon, from which comes the word pneumatic: air, spirit. What Paul is really saying is: I do not want you to be ignorant of the things, the matters of the Spirit. God does not want any believer to live their life in ignorance of the deep things concerning the matters of the Spirit, including spiritual gifts. God wants us to understand, to be instructed, to know how to move in that wonderful dimension of the Power and the anointing, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And that is why Paul writes these passages here.

And then he begins by saying: “You know that when you were Gentiles, you were led astray to mute idols. Therefore I want you to know that no one speaking by the Spirit of God can call Jesus accursed, and no one can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit.” Paul is speaking here to a people who knew about the things of the spirit. Unfortunately, however, in Corinth and throughout the Greco-Roman world, what passed for spiritual was rather demonic. People worshiped idols that were really demons in disguise.

So those people had a great deal of experience in matters of the spirit, but not the Holy Spirit, not the divine Spirit, but demonic spirits. And so what Paul wants them to understand is that there are different spirits, and that the Holy Spirit in whom the children of God, the believers in Jesus Christ, move is a Spirit very different from the other spirits among which they were accustomed to moving—in witchcraft, in idolatry, in occultism, and in all those demonic doctrines that circulated and were trafficked in the Greco-Roman world, in India, in Europe, among the tribes of Europe, and all these things. So Paul wanted them to be taught about how the Holy Spirit moves.

And that is why he begins here by saying: the first thing is, how can you identify something that is truly a spirit of God or the Holy Spirit? It is because that spirit confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and as the Son of God. “No one can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit.” Any other spirit out there, any other religion that does not acknowledge Jesus exclusively as Lord, Son of God, mediator between God and man, is not the Holy Spirit, and therefore is an accursed spirit; you must have no relationship with it. It must be the Spirit who acknowledges that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And then Paul begins, in verse 4 of First Corinthians chapter 12, to speak of how there is only one Spirit, the Holy Spirit, but that Spirit manifests Himself in different ways. He says: there are varieties of gifts, charismaton, or charísmaton; there are different gifts and endowments that the Lord gives His people, but the Spirit is the same; there is only one. God is one.

So Paul says: yes, there are different manifestations of the Spirit, but He is always one and the same, one Spirit expressing Himself through different manifestations. And there are varieties of ministries, diaconia, from which comes the word deacon—of services and ways of serving and moving in the Christian life—but the Lord is the same.

So there are different gifts and the power of God manifesting itself, and there are different people who move in different aspects of the Christian life, but the Holy Spirit is one and the same; they are not different spirits.

So I want to leave you here because we have gone on quite a while. God does not want us to be ignorant about His Spirit, and God wants the Spirit in whom we move to be a spirit that acknowledges—the Spirit who acknowledges—that Jesus is Lord. And also, that Spirit is one and the same, not different spirits. God bless you, and we will continue with our message later. Blessings.