[Editor’s Note: Christianity was birthed in the Holy Spirit. Jesus our Lord taught it was essential to rely and wait for the power of the Spirit. We sadly see many abuses of Spirit-led living in modern Christendom but this should make us all the more hungry for the true manifestation. We are impotent without the infilling power of the Spirit. When we have God in the midst everything changes. We will not be able to stay quiet, we will speak boldly for our Lord that bought us with such a great price.1003 The underground Church in China chooses their leadership from those who are the hungriest after God. Are you hungry for the living God? For His power displayed in your life?]
\tThe Church knows quite well both the reason and the remedy for failure. The human resources of the Church were never so great. The opportunities of the Church were never so glorious. The need for the work of the Church was never so urgent. The crisis is momentous; and the Church staggers helplessly amid it all. When the ancient Church reproached God with sleeping at the post of duty, God charged His people with being staggering drunk. The Church knows perfectly well what is the matter. The Church has lost the note of authority, the secret of wisdom, and the gift of power, through persistent and willful neglect of the Holy Spirit of God. Confusion and impotence are inevitable when the wisdom and resources of the world are substituted for the presence and power of the Spirit of God.
\tProofs abound. The New Testament furnishes examples of Churches filled with the Spirit and Churches without the Spirit. The differences are obvious. The Church of which Apollos was minister had not so much as heard that the Spirit was given. The Church in our day has no such excuse. Ours is the sin of denial. He has been shut out from the place in which He is indispensable. Religion has been reconstructed without Him. There is no denial of the supernatural, but it is insisted that the supernatural must conform to natural law. It is admitted that truth is inspired, but its inspiration must develop along the lines of natural selection and growth. Religion cannot be allowed to have come upon any other lines than those of literature, philosophy, and ethics. The Christian religion has simply the honor of being less faulty than the rest. Jesus Christ must be accounted for in the same way.
CHRISTIAN BELIEVERS WITHOUT THE SPIRIT
\tThe Church still has a theology of the Holy Spirit, but it has no living consciousness of His presence and power. Theology without experience is like faith without works: it is dead. The signs of death abound. Prayer-meetings have died out because men did not believe in the Holy Spirit. The liberty of prophesying has gone because men believe in investigation and not in inspiration. There is a dearth of conversions because faith about the new birth as a creative act of the Holy Spirit has lost its grip on intellect and heart. The experience of the Spirit Baptism is no longer preached and testified, because Christian experience, though it may have to begin in the Spirit, must be perfected in the wisdom of the flesh and the culture of the schools. Confusion and impotence are the inevitable results when the wisdom and resources of the world are substituted for the presence and power of the Spirit.
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The cravings lost religious men represent must be met by the experience of Pentecost. Modernism and mysticism are also the products of a religion that is not baptized of the Holy Spirit. Sacerdotalism is another. These things flourish on impoverished soil and dunghills. They are the works of the flesh, and the product of spiritual death. The answer is in the demonstration of a supernatural religion, and the only way to a supernatural religion is in the abiding presence of the Spirit of God.
read the full sermon here: http://gospelfellowships.net/pdf/withouttheholyspiritofgod.pdf