Grieve not the Holy Spirit

The Holy Ghost suggests in Ephesians 4:31 how we can grieve Him. He mentions bitterness, anger, clamor, evil-speaking and malice. He also mentions in Galatians 5:19-21 fornication, uncleanness, covetousness, filthiness, foolish talking, improper jesting; those things which the Holy Ghost says in a blessed understatement (in our English)— “These things are not convenient.” Certainly they are not convenient. These are the things that hinder revival.\tI am convinced there is not a college student body in the world—in spite of all the hard work and study, burning the midnight oil and hurrying to make classes and all the rest—that could not have a glorious, high-level, sweet revival all the time. And I am sure there is not a church in the whole world that could not have maintained within it a beautiful, high-level, joyous revival all the time—if we would get honest with ourselves and deal with the things that grieve the Holy Spirit.\tBitterness, wrath, uncleanness, impurity, dishonesty, cheating, failing to pay our bills, complaining, lying, excessive exaggeration, levity and frivolity—these things grieve the Holy Ghost and keep Him from working. You may have been praying for a long time for your pal, and he is not saved yet. Maybe he could be, but he has not seen in you that which makes him want what you have. A grieved Holy Ghost keeps the light out of your countenance.\tLet us be serious. Let us cut everything else to the bone, and let us deal with our relation to this Person who is in our midst.[This sermon was delivered at Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, September 30, 1952A.W. Tozer

A great Danish preacher [Soren Kierkegaard] whom I do not follow in everything, but whom I believe says many good things, has complained in one of his great sermons about what he calls the light and superficial quality of repentance. He says that often we mistake moral impatience for repentance. We are mad at ourselves. We sin, and we are angry with ourselves because we had better hope for ourselves. He says we mistake anger with ourselves for true repentance. Then he goes on to say that a true Christian will be known by the depth of his repentance. Wherever you find a true Christian man or woman—whatever their denomination—they will be known for the depth and sincerity of their repentance.\tNo man could believe in the grace of God more than I, and he could not contain any more joy for the grace of God than I. But while the grace of God redeems and salvation is by grace, I am not going to allow myself to forget while I live in this world that I have sinned against the Triune God. I want that thing to sting me sometimes, particularly if I raise my head a little bit or tend to boast a little.\tI believe this healing wound is good for the soul. Lady Julian prayed, “God, wound me with very contrition. Make me sorry that I ever sinned, and keep me there.” Though Paul was so joyous that he could write Philippians, the joy Epistle, from a prison, throughout his Epistles there will recur occasionally indications that Paul had never quite forgotten what a sinner he had been.\tI do not believe we will ever have the expected revival in America until we have again a generation of prophets that shall rise up and deal with sin. I will not preach against bobbed hair and lipstick, the little incidental sins which may or may not be bad, but I will deal with sin as it relates to the holy Trinity, and make us feel again what our Calvinistic forebears made us feel until we crawled on our knees with it. The exceeding sinfulness of sin (Romans 7:13), because it was an act done against the exceedingly holy God, is wound number one—the wound of very contrition.A.W. Tozer

The Wound of Compassion\tThe second is the wound of kind compassion. Lady Julian wanted to suffer with Jesus and feel as He felt about the world and grieve with the world. I think that is the greatest hindrance to Christianity today—not modernism, nor communism, but un-Christlike Christians. These people display a hard orthodoxy that has never felt compassion. Instead they ram a crumpled tract into the fist of the sinner and make him take it. They push John 3:16 down his throat with a ramrod, look him in the eye, and make him feel that he is an uncircumcised Philistine while they pretend to be God’s chosen people.\tA hard Christianity never could have won me. My father was a high-tempered, blazing Englishman and there is too much of that in me to ever be won by one of these mean-looking, cocky soul-winners that read the book How to Win Souls in Seven Easy Lessons. I would have turned my back on him, and though I only weigh 160 pounds, I think I would have probably bowled him over. I never could take religion without compassion. To me, it is a skeleton without meat and without life.\tI worry a little about myself (probably more than I should) because I do not love people more. You know, some people just spill all over you—their eyes are always wet and they have a handkerchief handy continually because they just love you so much, but sometimes they weigh me down. There used to be a fellow I knew that always wanted to grab me and kiss me, and the trouble with the fellow was he always had two days’ growth of beard, and I did not react well to that! I do not mean that slobbery kind of compassion that drools around.\tI wonder and worry because I have not loved more. But God is comforting my heart a little because He is showing me that compassion is love, of a sort. It is another side of love. I do not know that I love people so tremendously but I pity people until I grieve in the night season.\tI pity the lad who has to go to Korea. 2 I pity the boy who lies over there face up, not seeing the stars. I pity the poor mother who is left here at home. I pity the little fellow who plays on Wednesday, gets a sore throat on Thursday, and on Friday is crippled for life with polio. I pity people until I am in misery most of the time, or at least a good part of the time. This is the kind of wound that God has most graciously given me in my heart, a wound I never want to heal. I want to feel with people—compassion, suffering and co-suffering. I want to be able to suffer along with other people.\tThis is closest to my heart and the thing I feel that we need the most in this awful hour—compassion. I have a little prayer book here which I got in the ten cent store. It was blank when I bought it, and I have written my own prayers into it and have carried it around for years. One of my prayers is, “Oh, Lord Jesus, help me to feel exactly as you feel about people. Help me to love them exactly as you love them and in the same way that you love them.” God may be answering that prayer a little by letting me suffer compassion for the woes of the world.\tI am afraid that even some of our soul winning is little more than zeal to make proselytes, but there must be tears along with it. Moody is quoted as saying a lot of things he never said, but Moody is quoted as having said that no man had the right to preach on Hell except he preach with tears in his eyes. 3 He loved them and pitied them, and so this love and pity, down through the years, has been a stream of Gospel sincerity; it has been the evidence of the indwelling Jesus who wept over Jerusalem and who went out to die.\tThe wound of compassion is a faithful wound, my friend, and I ask that you seriously think about this with me and when you can, pray to God about it. Let your prayer be, “Oh God, give me and keep in my heart the wound of very compassion and the wound of very contrition. Let me feel how bad I have been, but also, let me feel how terribly distressful the world is, and let me suffer along with the poor suffering world.”A.W. Tozer