Don’t Quench The Holy Spirit

I have talked about throwing water on people’s faith which I think happens often.  When people walk in faith and God is using them and blessing them and their ministries, it is easy for us to be jealous and respond with sarcasm by our words, looks or actions which result in belittling the person speaking and discouraging the person instead of encouraging that person.

God’s Word says this in Ephesians 4:29-31, “Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice.”  

When you are new in the faith, you may have a struggle with some of the things you used to do but as time goes on and you allow the Lord to do His perfect work in you, a change will take place and you will become more and more like Him, loving the things He loves and hating the things He hates.  When we act out of love, we will rejoice with our brother or sister; that is being an encouragement and not a discouragement to them.  When we use mean and harsh words and have bad attitudes toward others, we can grieve the Holy Spirit that we are sealed with.

It says this in 1 Thessalonians 5:19, “Quench not the Spirit.”   

The footnotes in my Life Application Study Bible say this about this verse, “By warning us to ‘quench not the Spirit,’ Paul means we should not ignore or toss aside the gifts the Holy Spirit gives.  He mentions prophecy (5:20); in 1 Corinthians 14:39, he mentions tongues. Sometimes spiritual gifts are controversial and cause division in a church.  Rather than trying to solve the problems, some Christians prefer to smother the gifts.  This impoverishes the church.  We should not stifle the Holy Spirit’s work in anyone’s life but encourage the full expression of these gifts in the body of Christ.”

I read in another blog that we quench the Holy Spirit by not obeying Him when He asks us to do something and we continue to refuse, resulting in a hardening of the heart and as time goes on you don‘t hear His voice anymore.

Psalms 95:6-11, “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you will hear His voice: ‘Do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, when your fathers tested Me; they tried Me, though they saw My work. For forty years I was grieved with that generation, and said, ‘It is a people who go astray in their hearts, and they do not know My ways.’ So I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest.’”

David warned against hardening your heart like the Israelites did in the wilderness by continuing to resist the will of God.  When you harden your heart against God by being stubborn and doing your own thing, then you cannot turn to God.  This doesn’t happen quickly but by persistently refusing the will of God over a period of time it can happen.  So be careful that you don’t allow sin or anything to pull you away from God and don’t make choices that will cause you to disregard God.

According to Steve Simms, in one of the blogs he wrote, he feels this is what quenching the Holy Spirit means:

 “Quench not the Spirit” is one of the most disobeyed scriptures in the New Testament.  So how do we quench the Spirit.  Here are the Top Ten ways.

10) We teach people that God isn’t speaking to human beings nowadays.

9) We freely indulge our desires to the point that our heart gets so hard that we no longer hear what God is saying to us.

8) We tell the Holy Spirit that we will do what He wants later, or when we are older.

7) We intentionally disobey the direct commands of Scripture.

6) When we are with believers, we pretend that we are better Christians than we really are.

5) We ignore the guidance of that our conscience gives us.

4) We care more about what other people think about us than we care what God thinks about us.

3) We believe that because of grace it doesn’t matter if we obey God or not.

2) We let our pride keep us from doing anything that we consider to be humbling.

1)  We force people to quench the Spirit by programming church meetings to the point that no one but the preacher or someone on the program is expected or allowed to initiate anything in the meeting.

I have given you something to think about, heed the warning and repent if this is you.  May God bless you and may you have a good day!!