Maybe you don't need the Holy Spirit

The lead pastor at our church kicked off a message series on the Holy Spirit some time ago. The message was excellent as I would expect from him. It has caused the wheels in my mind to turn in directions they haven't for awhile. This message and some other things I have been reading over the past several months (especially a couple of John Eldredge books) mixed together in my mind to generate some new thoughts for me. I decided that this was as good a place as any to share them. First, I believed long before reading Eldredge that spiritual warfare is real, that we have a crafty enemy in the spiritual realm. Since the Holy Spirit is an incredibly powerful resource for the followers of Christ, it would make perfect sense that our enemy would wish to minimize the effectiveness of that resource. Let the Christians settle for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, but neglect actual life in the Holy Spirit. Cause the Christians to divide up over the gifts and manifestations of the Spirit in the lives of believers. Once the camps are fully formed with each fully convinced that they know what the Spirit does and does not do, what the Spirit used to do but no longer does, and what the Spirit does versus what we do - the Unholy Spirit can preside over the camps. Thus, some camps are guilty of blaming the Holy Spirit for many acts of the flesh or downright deception. Other camps are filled with people absolutely afraid of the Holy Spirit. They don't even like discussing the subject; forget getting near the Person. I fear that much of Christ's Church is impaired related to the Holy Spirit. Most of the impairment that I see lies in two arenas. In one arena are many believers whose experience with the Holy Spirit is limited to emotional feelings they have occasionally, mostly in emotionally charged church meetings. The other arena is made up of those who, for a variety of reasons, have no experience with the Spirit or any desire for an experience with the Holy Spirit. Let me first address the first group. I don't mean to suggest that an experience with the Holy Spirit is devoid of emotion. I only want to state that experiences with the Spirit are not necessarily laden with thrilling emotions. And thrilling emotions are not in themselves very accurate measures of the Holy Spirit's presence or work. Frankly, the enemy has a pretty long track record of using thrilling emotional experiences to promote and perpetuate sinful behavior in us. One should be careful not to substitute a mere emotional experience from a spiritual one, and a Holy Spiritual one at that. The second group is the larger of the two groups, in my opinion - at least in my day. People in this group have gross ignorance of, if not an outright aversion to, the Spirit. In the New Testament, there is an interesting passage about the Apostle Paul going to Ephesus and finding some people who expressed belief in Jesus. Apparently, he sensed something or saw something about their lives that made him ask, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" There answer made it clear why Paul's question was so appropriate. They said, "We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit" (Acts 19). Now, in the early years of the spread of Christian teaching, that statement makes sense. These were people who were baptized by John the Baptist and came to believe in and follow Jesus. They had somehow never encountered the full gospel message however since the resurrection of Jesus. It should not be so in our age, but I am afraid it is. Jesus is preached in places where the Holy Spirit is hardly mentioned. So, one could find believers in Jesus who might say, "I have never heard of this Holy Spirit" except by some to those TV preachers that I don't trust at all. In other denominational settings, I fear that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than a doctrine of Christianity.