“What are the commandments regarding the Holy Spirit?”

Steve Brown:
What are the commandments regarding the Holy Spirit? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Life is hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us. But there’s a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So, here’s seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth to answer your questions.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, hey, you look good today.

Steve Brown:
Whenever somebody says to an old guy, you look good. If they have a spark of compassion in them, they don’t add, for an old guy.

Pete Alwinson:
No, no, no. Listen, that’s true. You know, you look good and you’re vibrant. You’re alive. I’m just glad you’re fighting it. Staying in the game, baby.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. That’s Pete Alwinson, by the way. And he comes in every week and has for a long time. And we sit down and answer questions and we love your questions. You can record your question by calling 1-800-KEY-LIFE and you can do that anytime. And we sometimes put you on our airways, from our phone lines. Or you can send your question to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
Maitland, Florida 32794

in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
P.O. Box 28060
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8

or you can e-mail your question to [email protected] and if you can help us financially, please do. We’re a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. Both of those organizations oversee our books to make sure that we were ethical. And we’ve been ethical before those organizations were around, but if you need credentialing, you can get it there. So, help us if you can and be as generous as you can. And if you can’t, we understand. Hey Pete, pray for us and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right, let’s pray together. Our Father, we thank you that we can come into your presence boldly and yet humbly today before you because of Jesus. We honor you, our great God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we ask that as we pause in your presence today, you would help us to hear your voice through your word, through your Spirit. And just that sense that you are with us wherever we go. Thank you that you will never leave us and never forsake us. Thank you that you’re present wherever we are in all of your fullness. And we come to you at the end of this week, and we thank you for being in charge all week. We come to you, Lord, not because we’re perfect, but because Jesus has been and is perfect for us. And we come to you, Lord, with our issues, Lord, we have people to forgive. We have pains to overcome. There’s problems that we have to solve that we can’t do without you and we ask for your power and your presence and your wisdom and your truth in our lives every day. May your gospel make its powerful presence in our life and through our lives. And now, we commit this time of Q&A to you and ask that you would be honored and glorified as we pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
You know Pete, I love your prayers. I really do. They, you’re not just praying to be heard, you’re praying to him. And you know, we have a producer of this program, his name is Jeremy. And before we record any of these questions, we ask Jeremy to pray. He does the same thing you do, not just talking to be heard. He wants to be, my brother said one time he was asked to pray the grace and he mumbled it and my father said son I didn’t hear you and Ron said and he got smacked for it. He said, I wasn’t talking to you. Let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
When he said that there’s not too many commands about the Holy Spirit other than be filled with the Spirit, there are two other ones, I Thessalonians 5 about.

Don’t quench the Holy Spirit.

And Ephesians 4

Don’t grieve the Spirit.

And of course, by implications, because of what Jesus said. We also do not ever want blaspheme the Holy Spirit.

Steve Brown:
Good point. Frankly, I was, and I asked Jeremy, who produces the teaching program on the Holy Spirit if he remembered, I don’t remember saying that, but listen, 51% of whatever I teach you, 49% is probably not true. The problem is, I don’t know which is and which isn’t, which means that you have to get out your Bible and check for yourself. But she makes a good point. There are those commandments that relate. What’s blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that would be speaking ill of the Spirit of God, denying His existence, or claiming that He is not divine.

Steve Brown:
Or making fun of Him.

Pete Alwinson:
Making fun of Him.

Steve Brown:
And by the way, that’s not unforgivable because God wouldn’t forgive it. It’s unforgivable because you won’t ask. As a matter of fact, every time you do that, you move further away and the voice of God gets further away. And after a while, you don’t give a rip.

Pete Alwinson:
The hardening of the heart.

Steve Brown:
Oh man. And it’s a process and I’ve seen it in people that I love and I’ve hated it every time that I’ve seen it. How do you grieve the Holy Spirit?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I think by denying his promptings when you sense them by saying no, by rebelling, having a hard heart, like the Israelites again, you know.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, you know, there is a cult that teaches the Holy Spirit is not a person. And the way you counter that is with the clear statement that you shouldn’t grieve the Holy Spirit. You can’t grieve somebody who’s not a person. And so, we know that the Holy Spirit is a person. What was the other one? Grieve and blasphemy.

Pete Alwinson:
Do not quench the Holy Spirit.

Steve Brown:
How do you quench the Holy Spirit?

Pete Alwinson:
And I think we quench the Holy Spirit when he continues to prompt us and lead us and we deny it and we reject it. I think you quench, I think God does back off at times

Steve Brown:
I do too.

Pete Alwinson:
when he’s deliberately making something clear to us and we say no, and then we bear the consequences often.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, that’s true. Cliff Barrows used to say.

The Holy Spirit is a gentleman and he won’t strong arm his way into your life.

I don’t know the theology of that. I got a little bit of a problem, but I understand what he was saying, and it’s a reality. Okay Pete, this is an e-mail. How should one look at the decisions made within the church? Does the pastor have full say so over what is done, or does the congregation have a vote? What about deacons? What about elders? How should one view the church chain of command?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, I so appreciate getting that question because we have seen in the last, really in the last 10 years, a lot of new structures of church government or polity are the technical terms, that are out there. And a lot of them are not really productive. And so, this is a good question. We really need more Christians to study church government again and how the church ought to be led.

Steve Brown:
And there are disagreements within that. And legitimate disagreements.

Pete Alwinson:
Legitimate disagreements

Steve Brown:
And I don’t think the Scripture, the Scripture gives some broad parameters that are important, like nobody gets to be King except Jesus.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And if the pastor is playing that role, you need to go to another church.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But within some broad parameters, I think it’s kind of confusing, frankly.

Pete Alwinson:
It can be.

Steve Brown:
I mean, there are different views of church government that have Biblical warrant to it, as long as they’re within the parameters that are clearly Biblical that everybody who serves in leadership should be accountable to other people.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That that’s a big deal. Even if you read on spiritual gifts in I Corinthians 12:13 and 14, you see that there’s a mutual submission to one another, but in the pastoral epistles, it’s pretty clear that even in those very early days, there were two offices, the elders who tended to be the leaders and teachers and governors in a sense of the church. And then the deacons that tended to be focused on mercy ministry, service, and care for the infirm. And so, those two offices are, were there early and it’s important to look, but even the senior pastor, today we call them senior pastors or lead pastors is one of the elders and is not the king. You’re right. Jesus is the King and there’s a mutual submission. Elders are always in the plural in the New Testament, same with Deacon.

Steve Brown:
And that comes back to a really important principle that overrides everything. And that is that we need to be accountable to one another.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right, that’s right.

Steve Brown:
That doesn’t mean a leader shouldn’t lead. I believe in strong leadership. The German philosopher Goethe said. That when people are, the question was, when are people useless? And he answered it by saying.

When they don’t lead, and leaders don’t lead, and followers don’t follow.

There should be strong leadership, and that is not abuse.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Now, we’re not talking that. We know that there’s abuse.

Steve Brown:
Exactly. And abuse is horrible, but that’s not abuse. Strong leadership is not that. But strong leadership that is not accountable in any way to anybody, except I’m accountable to God. You run as fast as you can, because that’s the stuff of which cults are made.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Now, they also ask the question, do people get a vote? You know, it’s interesting, there really is no vote in the New Testament about a church. However in the denomination we serve, there is a congregational vote for officers and it’s really the representative form of government. But the shepherds of the church ought to be very attentive to the sheep. And so, that’s why they know what the sheep need, they care about the sheep. So, even though the vote isn’t there, the attention and love is.

Steve Brown:
And so, that means there’s a lot less disunity and division and hostility. One of the requirements we always had for elders was they had a constituency, that they cared about and they loved and who supported them. Just because a man was spiritual, or wise, or knew the Scripture, that’s not enough.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
He needs to be connected with the people of God.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s so important. An elder or executive board member or whatever you want to call it, has got to have a ministry. He’s got to be ministering to people. He’s not just a policy maker.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. You know, if they’d give us the power, Pete. We could fix all these problems.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, I think you could be the new Pope and I could be one of your Cardinals.

Steve Brown:
No, no. You’d be the Pope. I get to be the assistant Pope.

Pete Alwinson:
Okay. That’d be fun.

Steve Brown:
That works.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. I mean, for a short period of time, maybe a couple of weeks or something.

Steve Brown:
Well, we’ll need at least a year to get it. Guys, we’ve got to go. But first Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.