As I was reading this, "Should we misunderstand the truth and expect God to move our mind, emotion, volition, and body directly, we open wide the door to the counterfeit of evil spirits," it occured to me this is exactly what Pentecostals do in gibberish babble. They say they are in the Spirit when they are babbling gibberish, that God gives them this utterance to move their larynx through the mind, emotion and volition. Yet they never question which spirit this is of? Can you see why it is so important to discern the Word, otherwise one could misread it and derive a different conclusion to behave in odd ways.
The Work of the Holy Spirit
Those believers are numberless who have plunged into passivity and enslavement because of not understanding the work of the Holy Spirit. What follows are some of the most common misunderstandings.
1. Obey the Holy Spirit. Believers think Acts 5.32 suggests that they must obey the Holy Spirit—“the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” But they fail, according to the command given in the Bible, to test all the spirits to see if they are of truth or of error (1 John 4.1,6 ). They instead accept as being the Holy Spirit every spirit which comes to them. They think this obedience must be highly pleasing to God. What they do not know is that the Scripture here does not teach us to obey the Holy Spirit but to obey God the Father through the Spirit. In verse 29 of Acts 5 the Apostles when under questioning by the council replied that they “must obey God.” Should anyone make God the Spirit his object of obedience and forget God the Father he tends to obey the spirit in him or around him instead of obeying through the Holy Spirit the Father Who is in heaven. This will set him on the road to passivity and in addition provide the evil spirits the chance for counterfeit. Overstepping the bounds of the Word of God ushers in countless perils!
2. The Rule of the Holy Spirit. We will recall from our past discussion how God rules our spirit through the Holy Spirit and how our spirit rules our body or the entire person through the soul (or will). This may sound simple, yet the spiritual implication is enormous. The Holy Spirit influences our intuition alone to make His will known. Only our spirit does he fill and nowhere else. Never does He control or fill our soul or body directly. This point should be carefully underscored. We should not therefore expect God’s Spirit to think through our mind, feel through our emotion, or decide through our volition. He makes His will known to our spirit’s intuition in order that we ourselves may think and feel and act according to His will. It is a grave blunder to think we must offer our mind to the Holy Spirit to let Him think through it. The truth is He never uses man’s mind directly instead of man. He never asks him to offer himself passively to Him. What God wishes is cooperation with him. He does not work for man, because even His movement in working for him could be quenched by the believer. He never forces anyone to do anything.
The divine Spirit does not directly control man’s body either. If man desires to speak he has to engage his own mouth—to walk, his own feet—to work, his own hands. The Spirit of God never interferes with man’s freedom of will. Aside from working in man’s spirit (which is God’s new creation), He does not use any part of man’s body apart from the consent of the latter’s own volition; nay, even if man is willing, He does not exercise any of his bodily parts for him. Man should be his own master. He must exercise his own body. This is God’s law which He will not violate.
We often say that “the Holy Spirit rules over man.” By this we mean He works in us to make us obedient to God. But if we should mean that He directly controls our total being we are in complete error. We can distinguish right here between the work of the Holy Spirit and that of evil spirits. The Holy Spirit indwells us to witness that we belong to God whereas evil spirits manipulate people to reduce them to robots. God’s Spirit asks for our cooperation; evil spirits seek direct control. Hence it is plain that our union with God is in the spirit and not in the body or soul. Should we misunderstand the truth and expect God to move our mind, emotion, volition, and body directly, we open wide the door to the counterfeit of evil spirits. While a Christian should not follow his own thought, feeling or preference, nevertheless after he has received revelation in his spirit he ought to execute with his mind, emotion and will this charge which has come to his spirit.
