Lessons from Ephesians No.3 Good Grief

In this passage before us today, the writer of the Hebrews shows the folly of the ancient Hebrews, when they offended God's Holy Spirit and grieved Him. Hebrews chapter 3. Therefore, holy brothers, who share in heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess. He was faithful to one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God's house.

Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything. Moses was faithful as a servant in all God's house, testifying to what would be said in the future.

But Christ is faithful as a son over God's house, and we are His house, if we hold on to our courage and the hope of which we boast. So as the Holy Spirit says today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me, and forty years saw what I did. That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said, their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.

So I declared on oath, in my anger, they shall never enter my rest. See to it, brothers, that no one, not you, has a sinful, unbelieving heart, turns away from the living God, but encourage one another daily, as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if we hold firmly to the end confidence we had at first.

As has just been said, today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as you did in the rebellion. Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest, if not to those who disobeyed, so that they were not able to enter because of their unbelief? Verse 29. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs.

That it may benefit those who listen. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, brawling, slander, along with every form of malice.

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. I want to speak to you this morning from this series on good grief. I don't know where that expression originated.

I haven't traced it back in the history of the English language. But what I would say is this, that there are illustrations throughout the Old and New Testament of what must be referred to as good grief. Grief from the good.

For instance, if you were to turn to Jeremiah in chapter 2, the 13th verse, you will find that the Lord is lamenting over the sins of his people. My people have committed two sins. They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

Alan Redpath says that you can hear the sob of God's voice in that verse. My people have forsaken me. Grief.

Good grief. If I had a camera and had been present during the ministry of our Lord Jesus, and the thought doesn't strike you as sacrilegious, among several shots that I would like to have taken would have been that of our Lord Jesus when Peter was in the courtyard. You remember it's early morning, the cock has crowed twice, Peter has denied the Lord Jesus three times, and Luke's gospel tells us, the reference I've displayed for you, Jesus turned and looked on Peter.

How would you describe that look? Good grief? Grief from one who is good? And we move on to Ephesians and to the passage that I've just read once more to you. And there in the fourth chapter and the thirtieth verse, the apostle refers to the Holy Spirit. And he says that the Holy Spirit is not to be grieved.

And in one sense you can define good grief in terms of divine sorrow. Divine sorrow. Does it strike you, my friend, as being incredible that God can be sorrowful over you? You've known what it's been to be broken hearted, whether you're a young lad in your teenage or whether you're an older man in your seventies.

You can't have gone through life and not known some tinge of heartache. Now God, only in much greater degree, is like that. He knows grief.

He knows disappointment. Now you say, well you've shared all this with us before and in one sense you're right. But I haven't shared it fully and I don't have the opportunity to share it fully because I don't have the understanding so to do.

But before you can come on to what I believe are more exciting, well perhaps not more exciting but very equally exciting scriptures later on in this fifth chapter about being filled with the Holy Spirit and worshipping in the Holy Spirit, you have to have in perspective or else you'll never understand that terminology, what it means to grieve the Holy Spirit. You know sometimes you can get one statement of scripture and it's a verse that's really like a mine shaft you need to drop down and then to go along the veins of truth. And I believe that when Paul here spends an economy of words telling us not to grieve the Holy Spirit, he's appealing to those with insight to dig into what he has to say because everything in the fourth chapter I would argue and on in the fifth and sixth where he's putting down good Christian teaching swings on that.

Christianity as I seek to show you is not just keeping a list of regulations. It is that but it's that by secondary nature and not primary. You'll see what I mean in a moment or so.

So let's come back to this injunction of Paul. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God. And let me speak to you about the Spirit and His character.

The Spirit and His character. This I have yet to bring out from the text. If you were translating it literally into the English then this is the rendering.

Do not grieve the Spirit, yea the Holy Spirit of God. You see it doesn't quite grab you like that in the A.V. or the N.I.V. and rightly so the translators were quite proper. They've got the words together, the adjective holy with the noun spirit.

But what the Greek can do that the English can't do is it can emphasize the adjective the Spirit, yea the Holy Spirit. Don't grieve Him. And now this needs to be brought out because there's a tendency for us sometimes to think of the Spirit in terms of Him being pally rather than in terms of His purity.

And if you have a familiarity with the Spirit you can only have that intimacy when first you've traced out what it means by holy, the Holy Spirit. The apostle later on as I've indicated is going to tell us about the fullness of the Spirit. Another terminology that is in Scripture and bandied around sometimes loosely sometimes accurately in my understanding today is terminology like the baptism in the Spirit.

You want to be filled with the Spirit, you want to know the baptism of the Spirit. Seems to me that the question that presupposes both these but is not heard too much is do you want to be holy? Because your experience of the Spirit is correlated, that means is related to the amount of holiness that you desire. And holiness is a very difficult yet a very compelling wall to which God calls us.

Will you turn to Hebrews in chapter 12, Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 14. And there you find the apostle, whoever it was doing the writing, the anonymous writer, saying in the 14th verse, make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy. Without holiness no one will see the Lord.

See how important it is to emphasize holiness, the holiness of the Spirit and the holiness that God wants from you. See, holiness leads to happiness. You can't be happy and be unholy, do you know that? There's a glib form of happiness of course that's really superficial, it's a counterfeit, it's not what the New Testament means by being happy.

To be happy is to be content with God. And you can only be content with God when you're not grieving God, and you can only not be grieving God when you're living a holy life. That's why the writer here says, without holiness no one will see the Lord.

You can't be happy without being holy, neither can you know the presence of God. Turn back in your Bibles to Psalm, Psalm verse 15 will you. And there you get one of the most majestic, if one dares to compare scripture with scripture, one of the most majestic Hebrew poems, Psalm 15, verse 1, who, who can be in God's presence? The Lord says, says the psalmist in questioning fashion, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill? And then he tells us, verse 2, he whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous.

Happiness and knowing the presence of God is very much related to the holy way in which we walk, the holy way in which we live. So, you see, when the apostle, going back to Ephesians 4, if you've got arthritis of the fingers this morning, then our Bible study is really going to get you moving, go back to Ephesians 4, you discover that Paul has got stacked in front of verse 30, and following verse 30, and into the fifth chapter, certain ethical injunctions, certain commands of how we are to live. But you see, you can't really approach those commands without putting emphasis, first of all, on the 30th verse.

Do not grieve the Holy Spirit. And if I don't grieve the Holy Spirit, then, verse 27, I won't give the devil a foothold. Verse 28, I will no longer thieve.

Verse 29, I won't be obscene or foul-mouthed in my conversation. Verse 3 of the next chapter, there will be no hint of sexual immorality, any kind of impurity. Why not? Because these things are opposed to the Holy Spirit, and I don't want to grieve Him.

So you see how Paul, if you like, tosses a theological grenade into these injunctions, and he shows us, if we've got the wit to work out what he's saying, how we can follow those injunctions through. We'll come back to that in a moment. The Spirit and the character.

Well, the character of the Spirit is one of holiness. But let's think about the Spirit and His conduct. The Spirit and His conduct.

In 2 Corinthians 1, verse 22, we're told that the Spirit resides in the hearts of every Christian. He is the deposit, the guarantee that we belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. We know the expression, born again, so often in the ministry of Dr. Billy Graham, and made perhaps famous in America by Jimmy Carter's declaration that he was a born-again Christian.

We know that the idea indicates conversion, but how does that conversion come about? Well, by the Holy Spirit, you see. What are you right now? A child of God. But you're not naturally a child of God.

You weren't born as a child of God. You became a child of God when you confessed your sins. Indeed, verse 8 of chapter 5 describes what you were like.

You were once darkness, but now you're light in the Lord. Live as children of light. Paul doesn't say, once you lived in darkness, but you were darkness.

When I taught in Tottenham, my lads would colloquially say, if someone who wasn't very intelligent, sir, he's thick. Now, spiritually, we're born thick. No light at all.

Now, who brings light? Well, the Holy Spirit. God commands His light to shine in our hearts, to give us a knowledge of the glory of the gospel of Christ. But it's the Spirit of God who conveys this to us.

He is the one who makes us children of God. He's the midwife, so to speak. So here in verse 8, we're described as children.

In verse 5, we're described in exactly the same way. Verse 1, rather, of chapter 5, be imitators of God, therefore as dearly loved children. I say it's the conduct of the Holy Spirit to make us to be children of God.

Now, how does He do it? Think this one through. He does it by entering into a relationship with us. And that's a risky business.

So risky that let me shock you with a question. Two questions. Now, be honest.

Forget everyone else here just listening to what the preacher has to say to you. Who on earth do you love most? Now, you've all got an answer. Married people, they're partners.

Young people, maybe a brother, maybe mom or dad. Single people, maybe a very close friend. Alright? Second question.

Who do you hurt most? And the majority of you will say exactly the same answer to the second question as to the first. Because if you allow yourself to be loved, and you love, then you risk being grieved, do you not? Isn't it one of the paradoxes of human nature that the people you love most, you tend to hurt the most? It's a risky business to enter into a relationship, you see. The Spirit of God takes that risk, the risk of you, after He's conducted, if you like, the gift of being a child of God and made that absolute by entering your heart and guarantee it.

He takes the risk of you hurting Him. Some dear friends of mine who became members of the tab a few years ago, shared, and I honored them for so doing, why it was that they'd taken such a long time to become a member of our local fellowship. And they said to me, well, you know, that the problem was, our previous church, they'd moved from somewhere north of Worthing.

Somebody had hurt them so much, and they didn't want to risk being hurt again. And so they thought the best thing would be, would be to stand on the edge of the church, so to speak. And in one sense you can understand that, can't you? Because if you stand on the edge, then you're not likely to be hurt.

But once you commit yourself, whether it's a church relationship, a marriage relationship, a deep friendship, once you commit yourself, you run the corollary, the corollary risk of being hurt. And that's what God says in His word about Himself. The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity.

They take the risk of being hurt. Jesus was hurt by Peter. And the Holy Spirit can be hurt by our conduct, says Paul.

Let's move on to something else. The Spirit and His character, the Spirit and His conduct, the Spirit and His conflicts. Let's turn to another verse of Scripture, shall we? Galatians chapter 5. One of the most important verses of Scripture.

If you're going to work out why it is that sometimes you have difficulties as a Christian. Galatians chapter 5 and verse 17. I'll read from verse 16 to help those who are still finding the page to get there.

So I say, live by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit. And the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature.

They are in conflict with one another, so that you do not do what you want. But if you're led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. You see, the conflict there is when the Holy Spirit enters into our hearts and lives.

He clashes with our original nature, our Adamic nature. You remember how Paul puts it in Romans 7. He talks about the good that he wants to do and he can't do it. And he says, oh wretched man that I am, sin dwells in me.

Well, doesn't it? And I can fully understand the person who goes to a Louis Palo meeting or a Billy Graham meeting. Or even here at the tab, makes a commitment to the Lord. And then one month later they're saying, oh things are worse than they've ever been.

Why is that? Well, introduced into your life is the person of the Holy Spirit. But alas, there's not an exit to all that you used to be. You have to try it by the grace of God to reduce your old nature bit by bit.

And some of us who are getting longer in the tooth will tell you that it doesn't get any easier as the years go by. There's this conflict, the Spirit within me and my old nature. The one warring against the other.

Well, can I help you in the warfare? Some of you youngsters, what do you do? Well, don't do what I was brought up to do. And that was, I was given a sort of, a list of regulations. How to be externally holy.

Externally, not eternally, externally holy. It all had to do with certain don'ts. Don't wear lipstick, well I didn't have any problem there.

Or earrings, they weren't in vogue for men in my youth. Wear certain clothes on a Sunday. Stay away from the theatre and the cinema.

And so on. Now, what I was told to do, there was a great deal of common sense in it. And in some measure there was some help.

But there wasn't much help. Because it was all external, you see. I had to do these things, a sort of taskmaster.

You dare to go there and the Lord comes back and my, you've had it. Not too sure of the theology of the expression but the teaching was given. No, my friend, the reason why I want to be holy is not out of duty, but out of devotion.

Not out of duty, but out of devotion. How many people have you heard come to this pulpit on a baptismal occasion and say, I'm being baptised because the Lord says so and I love him. And if you love somebody a great deal, you do what they tell you to do.

And this is the reason, the positive way through to holiness is not because some elders gave you a list as long as your arm and said don't do that, don't do the other and so on and so forth. It's because you've fallen in love with God. You love the Lord Jesus.

You recognise that the great privilege of your life is to have the Holy Spirit dwelling within you. The motivation of devotion is far more powerful than the motivation of duty. Indeed, those who are motivated simply by duty can sometimes become the most obnoxious Pharisees.

And they have a sort of external rigid holiness that is devoid from all happiness. I'm not saying it must be the case, and don't misunderstand me. I'm recognising that there are certain things as a Christian that it's good for me not to do, it will harm me.

But the reason why I don't do them is not because I approach the New Testament legalistically, the law, but I approach it to find the loving gospel and recognise that the Lord is my Saviour and I don't want to let him down. You know, I love my dad. And I can never remember a time when my father ever physically disciplined me.

I remember many occasions when my mother did, that's a different story. I remember about Billy Graham's colleague, I've forgotten his name now, went to school with Billy Graham and he said that, told Billy Graham that he, what he disliked most about home was that his mother had a strap in the kitchen. To keep him sort of disciplined, and it wasn't that that he objected to, but over the straps he had the church motto, I need thee every hour.

My father could get his way by a look, and because of the love I had and still have for his memory, I would do what he would say, by and large. Now that's the pathway to holiness. Grieve not the spirit.

Don't swear, don't be immoral, don't do this, don't do the other. Why not, Paul? Well, because you love the Spirit of God residing within you, and you don't want to embarrass Him. And so you're on His side as far as the conflicts are concerned.

Augustine was a great man of God, a great theologian who lived centuries ago. You can read about Augustine in the book that I was recommending by Dr. Packer. And Augustine said this, love God and do as you please.

You know that sums up the teaching of the New Testament about our character and our conduct. Love God and do as you please. Not the other way around, must be that way.

Love God and let that be the controlling factor. And if you really love God, then what you please will please God, which is precisely what Paul said, because he got in on the scene before Augustine, down here in the 8th and 9th verses of chapter 5. Find out what pleases the Lord and do that. So what have we looked at this morning? The Spirit and His character, the Spirit and conduct, the Spirit and His conflicts.

Let's conclude. The Spirit and His controls. The Spirit and His controls.

How does the Spirit control me? Well, as I've said, not by regulations. The Spirit does more than that. He's a much greater psychologist than some headmasters.

The Spirit will control us by introducing us to ever-increasing depths of knowledge concerning God the Father and the Lord Jesus. Look at verse 32 of chapter 4. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. He's got the same comment in the first verse of the 5th chapter.

Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children, and live a life of love just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. How does the Spirit exercise His control? Well, He points me to the Lord Jesus. You know, I don't blush to tell you this.

It's accurate. I sometimes find it hard to conduct the communion service here on a Sunday. I do so because the bread and the wine are so precious to me that they really visually and emotionally stimulate me to realize the cost of my redemption.

And sometimes just to get the words out when I'm conducting the Lord's table, when I'm presiding over it. This is my body. This is my blood.

I find it so hard even to get the words out. The thing that used to keep me going as a young person, I offer advice to younger people as a Christian in my late teenage days with all the emotional conflicts and physical pressures that that brought was the Lord's table. It brought me back to base, to starting point.

He did this for me. And His love compels me to offer Him more than I did last week. So, Lord Jesus, fill me afresh with Your Spirit and give me greater birth and greater energy.

Melt my heart, O Savior. Melt it and break it down until I own Thee, Conqueror and Lord and Sovereign Crown. Spirit exercises His controls and the consideration is verse 32 and 5, verse 1. He takes us to the cross.

But we can cooperate with the Holy Spirit which brings us back to, finally, Robin's reading earlier this morning. The early Christians, or rather the early Hebrews, the ancient Hebrews, they really gave the Holy Spirit a rough time if I can speak like that. Turn to Hebrews 3. And as you're finding it, I sketch in the history.

Here the writer is taking us back to centuries ago when the Israelites were moving from Egypt back into the Promised Land. And they had so much going for them. God had in a remarkable way displayed His love.

He'd freed them from Pharaoh. He'd opened up the Red Sea. And then He took them on what should have been a leisurely ramble back into the Promised Land.

But it lasted for a long, long time. Forty odd years. And why? Because they grieved the Holy Spirit.

Will you notice? You who are Bible students, verse 7, quotes the Holy Spirit saying, speaking for God as He has a right to do of events yesteryear. And His whole point is that these children of Israel grieve the Spirit of God. Verse 17, comes out better in the authorized version.

I believe the translation there is, And with whom was He grieved for forty years? Is that right? With whom was He grieved? In the NIV, with whom was He angry? And the word translated grieved and angry in the original has a more powerful connotation than the word translated grieved in Ephesians 4.30. It's with whom was He disgusted? With whom was He disgusted? And the answer is with those Hebrews. Why was He disgusted? Because they hardened their hearts. They weren't moist.

They weren't malleable. They weren't like clay on the potter's wheel. They were stiff.

There was no water at all. And as a result, they were difficult to work with. That's what I mean by enabling the Holy Spirit's ministry in your own life.

Cooperating with Him so that He can bring about His purposes. Well then, we've looked at the doctrine of the Spirit to some degree again this morning. The Spirit in His character, the Spirit in His conduct, the Spirit in His conflicts, the Spirit and His controls.

And we did so under the general heading of good grief. Do you bring grief to the heart of God? Do I? Yes, I confess I do in some respects. So what's the antidote? Take me back to a fresh understanding of the love of God.

Concentrate on the holiness of God. God wants you holy, I repeat, before He wants you happy. You can't have the feeling of well-being just because it's manufactured in a service like this.

Your test of your relationship with the Lord is not a Sunday morning in the tab. It's relatively easy then. Relatively.

But on a Monday, and through right the way to Friday, endeavouring to live a holy life, thus pleasing the Spirit of God. Murray McShane said this, a great Scottish preacher. Lord, make me as holy as it is possible for a saved sinner to be.

You'll never be absolutely holy until Jesus brings you with a baptism of holiness before His Father and presents the church perfect. But you can say what McShane said. You can pray this and you can work towards this end.

Lord, make me as holy as it's possible for a saved sinner to be. And those who reach a measure of holiness will also find, run alongside with it, what it means to be full of the Spirit. And what a congregation means by worshipping in the Spirit.

So may these three addresses on grieving the Spirit of God have had a prophetic edge for us here at the tabernacle and be of help. Amen. I was going to switch the overhead off but some friends asked and I'll keep it on for a little while as I often get in front of their line of vision and they can't see what I put up there until I stand back in the last hymn.

Let's turn to 3-2-3, a hymn that we haven't sung very often but Betty's got a tune for us that we will know and be able to enter into the full meaning of what we are bringing before the Lord. 3-2-3. The theology of that last verse is superb.

Let's just take it again and let's sing that as our benediction and just say Amen at the close of singing and that will be the completion of our worship this morning. Verse 4.