The Holy Spirit’s role is to convict the world of sin. It is God’s Holy Spirit that gets hold of you and makes you realises that you need to do something. The Holy Spirit points to Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ did for you and me.
The Bible tells the story of when a Pharisee called Nicodemus came to talk to him.
John 3:1-6
When you come into this world, you are born of the flesh. During his encounter with Jesus, Nicodemus was going to realise that there is a difference between you’re first birth and being born again by the Holy Spirit.
John 3:7-13
Luke 1:35
John 3:14
Jesus Christ had to come down from heaven to this world. He didn’t come to condemn the world. The world was going to be saved through Him.
Romans 6:6
John 3:18-21
Romans 8:1-2
Before you become a Christian, you serve sin. If you look at the ten commandments and compare them to how you think, you know that you don’t keep them. You can’t keep them because you are under the law of sin and death. Only Jesus fulfilled the law and kept all the ten commandments.
Romans 8:3
This verse says that God’s solution means that He can sever, at the root, the power of sin in your life. As a Christian you’re set free from that default that curses you from birth, causing you to go wrong. There is no default causing you to go wrong anymore. The power of it has been broken because Jesus Christ took that sin into himself. The Holy Spirit brings faith into your heart through reading this word.
Romans 8:5-6
There’s a massive difference between death and life. That difference is not a con: that somehow you just convince yourself that this will work out. We exercise faith to believe that what Jesus did on the cross we need in order to be clean on the inside and to have the opportunity to go right.
Romans 8:7-9
There’s an ‘if’ there, so there must be a sense in which you can ask God to come and live in you. If the spirit of Christ is not inside you, you automatically default the wrong way. The Spirit of Christ and what He did on the cross makes it possible for me to live right. He gives me the power to live right.
Romans 8:10-11
The Spirit is the one who lives in you. He brings Christ himself into a human being. It becomes personal to you. You exercise your trust in what God did for you on the cross, through Jesus Christ. The divine nature then becomes part of you by the Holy Spirit. You’ve given up your life and through the Spirit, Jesus Christ takes up residence. Without the Spirit of Christ in you there is eternal damnation, but with Him there is eternal life. Don’t let the enemy of your souls tell you that you have tried this before but it never worked. By His Holy Spirit, God is making this clear to you.
Romans 8:12-15
From your first birth you have a spirit of bondage. Your sin nature dominates, you cannot be set free. You were bound to death and damnation. When the Spirit of Christ comes inside, it’s as if you have been adopted into the family of Christ. Jesus becomes your heavenly father.
Romans 8:16-17
You need to receive the Spirit of Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit, you are exercising your faith and receiving the spirit whereby you can cry, “Father, I want to please you, and I want to go forward with you inside me.” You then have the power to live right. You are asking God to come inside and to sort out the sin nature, and to live in you. You are asking Jesus to come inside.
Is it a problem if you know you’re a Christian but you can’t point to a specific time? Does that mean you’re not going to go to heaven? No. Faith does come by the words that are preached. It’s strange that it is just words, but yet those words by God’s Spirit get inside you. Why? Because God loves you. He doesn’t want you to be wrong. He doesn’t want you to be destroyed through sin. God so loved the world that He sent Jesus so that we could be free from sin.
When it came to Calvary the hosts of hell thought they’d cracked it. They knew what was going on and who Jesus was. They knew that if they could get rid of Jesus they could solve the problem of God. When Jesus died on the cross He took into Himself everything to do with sin.
In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus knew what was coming. That is why the Garden of Gethsemane is so poignant. Jesus was going to taste something He’d never had before. He’d always lived what was right and He knew what was coming was that sacrifice of Himself so that you’re secret things, you’re habits could be broken. He was going to take the consequences of sin: death, into Himself. Three days later the hosts of hell witnessed His resurrection. Death couldn’t hold Him. He conquered death. So He now lives seated on the right hand of the Father. By His spirit He now convinces you of the truth and can live inside you. He loves you and He wants you to partake of the solution He provided.
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