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Project: Your Statement of Faith - Lesson 5

Article Four: God the Holy Spirit

This lesson explores the nature, work, and experience of the Holy Spirit. It begins with an overview of the Holy Spirit and examines the definition and names of the Holy Spirit. It then moves on to the nature of the Holy Spirit and its work in Scripture. Next, the person of the Holy Spirit is explored, including its relationship to the Father and the Son, and its deity. Finally, the lesson looks at the experience of the Holy Spirit, including baptism, filling, and gifts.

Bill Mounce
Project: Your Statement of Faith
Lesson 5
Watching Now
Article Four: God the Holy Spirit

I. Overview of the Holy Spirit

A. Definition and Names

B. Nature of the Holy Spirit

C. Work of the Holy Spirit

II. Pneumatology in Scripture

A. Old Testament

B. New Testament

III. The Person of the Holy Spirit

A. Relationship to the Father and the Son

B. Deity of the Holy Spirit

IV. The Experience of the Holy Spirit

A. Baptism of the Holy Spirit

B. Filling of the Holy Spirit

C. Gifts of the Holy Spirit


Lessons
About
Transcript
Quiz
  • You will learn the definition, purpose, and components of a statement of faith, as well as how to create one by considering a set of questions and following a process.
  • You will gain an understanding of the Bible, its authority, interpretation, and its relationship with science, as well as an exploration of contradictions in the Bible and how to resolve them.
  • This lesson teaches you about God's nature, character, and activity, including his oneness, triune nature, attributes, holiness, love, sovereignty, and his activity in creation, providence, and redemption.
  • This lesson explores the person and work of Jesus Christ, providing a comprehensive understanding of His divine and human natures, humiliation, exaltation, redemption, and resurrection.
  • You will gain knowledge about the nature, work, and experience of the Holy Spirit from this lesson, including its definition and names, its relationship to the Father and the Son, and its baptism, filling, and gifts.
  • Gain insight into the doctrine of man and its implications, including the Biblical anthropology, the image of God, and the consequences of sin, and how it affects our daily lives and understanding of the human condition.
  • You will gain an understanding of the doctrine of salvation and its implications in this life and afterlife.
  • You will gain a better understanding of the doctrine of sanctification and its importance in the life of a believer. You will learn the definition of sanctification, the distinctions and degrees of sanctification, and the progressive nature of sanctification. You will also learn the means of sanctification and the goal of sanctification, which is transformation, holiness, and glorification. Finally, you will understand the significance of sanctification, which is to live a life of obedience, experience joy and abundance, and represent Christ in the world.
  • This lesson examines the doctrine of the church, exploring its definition, purpose, and mission. It also examines the relationship between the church, the Kingdom of God, and the Bible.
  • This lesson explores the Doctrine of Last Things, helping you to understand the theological implications, events, and applications of Eschatology.

Now that you have listened to the lectures it is time for you decide on the three things enumerated above: What you believe; What your church needs to believe; What is primary and secondary.

The best way to for this is to write out and then explain your own statement of faith. In this class you will see how Bill Mounce, the President of BiblicalTraining, does this for himself and his church. After listening to what he has to say, then your project is to do the same for yourself.

Dr. Bill Mounce
Project: Your Statement of Faith
TH099-05
Article Four: God the Holy Spirit
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:00] The next article in our statement of Faith is that of God, the Holy Spirit. The technical word for this is new mythology. Numa is just a Greek word for spirit. So what do we believe about the Holy Spirit? Now, you may be surprised how short this statement is. If this had been 20 years ago, we probably would have had to make it longer. But a lot of the things that were troubling the evangelical world have, for the most part, gone by the wayside. And so we could keep this statement pretty short, but here it is. God, the Spirit or God, the Holy Spirit is sent to convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. It's a verse out of John 16. He fully in dwells every true believer as a guarantee of his inheritance will come to that the Holy Spirit guides and empowers them. This is the believer gifts them for ministry intercedes in accordance with the will of God witnessing to Jesus. Now, there's probably a lot of other things we could have said, but these were the core things. He empowers those. That's the function of the spirit. He comes and he convicts us of sin. He empowers us to respond to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When we become Christians, He gives us at least one spiritual gift so that we can meet the needs of the body of Christ. And this interceding, I'm thinking specifically the Romans eight passage, where it says that when you're praying and you can't even you're not even sure how to say what you want to say. It's the Holy Spirit who intercedes with our spirit with groans too deep for words and takes what is in our hearts and brings them before the throne of God.

[00:01:41] And it's a wonderful thing that the Holy Spirit does. But there's three things that I want to say in particular about the Holy Spirit. The first is in the second sentence He fully in dwells 20, 30 years ago it was being taught, and it probably is to some degree now, but not nearly as much. It was being taught that there were different levels of feeling that if I became a Christian, the Holy Spirit came into my life. But at a later date, if I, the Holy Spirit, would do a second work of grace in me and I would speak in tongues, and then I would be fully in dwelt by the Holy Spirit. And that's just not a biblical position. It just isn't in the work of the Calvary Church and many good charismatic theologians has helped modify this excess. When you become a Christian, you are fully and dwelt by the Holy Spirit and all is fullness. And I do not have more of the Spirit than you have of the spirit. Now, there certainly are times when we are gripped by the Spirit. This is the language in Acts, a lot of being filled with the spirit that in some powerful way for a specific purpose, for a specific time, for a specific task. A person is filled with the spirit and he speaks. That's divine. Unction is the word that we use now for that. But in terms of us becoming Christians, God, the Spirit fully and dwells us and all equally. The other phrase that I just wanted to mention in passing, because it's going to come up later on, is the phrase that he is the guarantee of our inheritance. Now, we can't really disagree with this because that's what he Ephesians 113 and 14 say.

[00:03:24] I just picked up the language of F of Ephesians in this that the Holy Spirit is our guarantee of our inheritance, that we'll become a Christian. The Spirit comes into our life and he guarantees that we will receive our inheritance which is waiting for us in heaven. There is no doubt for a true Christian that he will get to heaven. Now this is getting into the area of perseverance of the saints. The once saved always save stuff. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later on. But I thought it was important to point out up here, up here, this is part of the function of the Holy Spirit to guarantee the true children of God that they actually will receive their inheritance. They will get to heaven. Now, there's a lot of things in this statement, in this particular article on the spirit that we're left out. I'm sure you'll notice that. And we've agreed to disagree on a lot of stuff related to the Spirit. We're not going to take a formal position on the issue of tongues or the issue of private prayer language or the issue of a word of wisdom from God. We're also not going to take a position on the cessation of the spirit, the cessation of the gifts. Are those gifts still for today and those issues? We're just not going to take a position on that because we believe that using words in their traditional sense, charismatics and non charismatics should be able to worship together. Because even though there may be a few points of theology where we're different, a biblical, charismatic and a biblical and almost a non charismatic, because we're all charismatic Christians, we we've been given the gift to the spirit and that sense, we're all charismatic.

[00:05:01] But for those where the tongues and the prophesying and that stuff is not as important, we have so much more in common than we have the divides. And yet so often in the church, these few points have divided us and we decided no, we believe so much the same thing that we can get together and people who believe in tongues and those who believe there's no such thing as tongues today should that those are secondary issues and that we should be able to worship together and we will worship together and we will simply learn to agree to disagree on some of these items. We'll have a fun time talking about them. We may debate them, but we're going to agree to disagree on them. So that's our statement of faith on the Holy Spirit.

 

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