What Happens When We Ignore The Holy Spirit?
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE IGNORE THE HOLY SPIRIT?
Video Clip Transcript extracted from the talk OBEYING THE HOLY SPIRIT (Luke 12:10) By Rev. Ernest O’Neill
I have something that God brought to my heart as something I should give this morning instead of the sermon. It concerns the verse in Luke if you would refer to Luke 12:10.
Luke 12:10, “And every one who speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. ”
If you are all worked up, “Oh have I committed the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit?” Well, if you are still even concerned about that, then you haven’t. But it’s a person who says, “No, no I haven’t”, and yet who does not respect or regard the Holy Spirit in their lives, they are the ones that perhaps have. But the message that God shared with me this morning is even a little closer to home than that.
The Holy Spirit speaks in each one of our lives. And if you keep on saying to yourself, “That isn’t the Holy Spirit, that was just my conscience, or that was just my own idea”, then you will gradually become immune to the voice of the Holy Spirit inside you. So if the Holy Spirit has told you to do something or to stop doing something and you do that little double-take, you know the little double-take, “Well, that could be the Holy Spirit”, and then as C.S. Lewis says, “You go outside and you get a breath of fresh air and you see a car pass or a bus pass and then you say to yourself, “That was a silly idea I had. For a moment, I thought that was God speaking to me.” Or you get into a book and you say to yourself, “Now, wait a minute, I can’t just go out and obey that. I mean that’s dumb, otherwise I’d be running around doing all kinds of weird things. Now, I better let my mind examine this that apparently I thought was the voice of the Holy Spirit.” And your mind isn’t examining it long before you’ve absolutely eliminated it as the voice of the Holy Spirit.
Loved ones, that’s why that sin is said to be the unforgivable one. I’ll show you the verse that indicates that. It’s in Hebrews 6:4-6, “For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy, since they crucify the Son of God on their own account and hold him up to contempt.”
Now again to those of you who specialize in self-condemnation, it’s important to see that those verses are saying clearly if such a person commits apostasy then it is impossible to restore again to repentance. Apostasy is simply forgetting God completely. It’s just turning the other way and never giving God any place in your life for the rest of your life. It’s becoming apostate, it’s denying the faith, denying belief in God, and it’s turning completely against Him. That’s what apostasy is. But do you see that the first verse applies to what we’re talking about?
It is impossible to restore again to repentance. It’s never impossible for God to forgive us, but if we won’t listen to the voice within us, we’ll never come to new repentance. So the Holy Spirit is speaking and saying, “Look, do that, do that”, and we’re saying, “Oh well, that was just my own idea. Oh, that was just a thought I had.” You keep on saying that and the Holy Spirit keeps on
trying to speak to you and you keep on resisting it. You eventually get to the point where it’s even impossible to renew you to repentance, simply because the Holy Spirit can’t get you to even suspect that you’re wrong, that’s it.
So it’s never impossible for God to forgive us. But we can get to the point where it’s impossible for Him to renew us again to repentance because He renews us to repentance through the voice of the Holy Spirit within us and through His influence. If you keep on hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit and saying, “That isn’t the Holy Spirit, that’s just my own idea or that was a thought I had”, then God cannot contact or do anything with you.
So loved ones, would you think about it? It certainly concerned me when God showed me this. There could be many of us who are experiencing great deadness in our Christian lives because we are just extravagantly rejecting the guidance that the Holy Spirit is giving us. We have in our minds a false idea of how He is going to speak and because He seems to be speaking though our minds, we keep on saying, “It isn’t the Holy Spirit, it’s just my idea.” And therefore you know what we do. We say, “It’s my own mind, so I can obey it whenever I choose or maybe I can think it over and analyze it away or maybe I can give it another kind of form.” But you see if that’s Jesus’ voice within you, you’re crucifying the Lord of glory afresh inside you.
You’re killing Him inside you and that’s why the word of the Lord is becoming so rare in your life. That’s why your life is becoming boring, becoming unexciting, becoming predictable and routine because you’re ignoring the words of the Holy Spirit.
Full Sermon: OBEYING THE HOLY SPIRIT (Luke 12:10) By Rev. Ernest O’Neill