Some Christians rarely think of the Spirit of God. Many think of the Spirit as useful to give us success in Christian living and ministry. Others consider Him a source of mystical experiences. However, the Bible reminds us almost a hundred times that the Spirit is holy and the giver of holiness. By examining a deadly confrontation between the Holy Spirit and hypocrites in the church, this message will show that the Spirit is the holy God who stands against this wicked world, and yet also the Spirit of Christ who is multiplying a holy people—one changed life at a time.

I. The Holiness of the Spirit’s Person

A. The Spirit’s Holiness and His Glory as God

B. The Spirit’s Holiness and the Spirits of the World

II. The Holiness of the Spirit’s Work

A. The Spirit’s Holiness and the Sanctity of the Church

B. The Spirit’s Holiness and the Advance of the Kingdom

Let's turn then to Acts 5. I'm going to read just the first 11 verses, Acts 5. But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession and kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it and brought a certain part and laid it at the apostles feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Ghost and to keep back part of the price of the land? While it remained, was it not thine own?

And after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? Why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias, hearing these words, fell down and gave up the ghost, And great fear came on all them that heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out and buried him.

And it was about the space of three hours after when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in. And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much. And she said, Yea, for so much. Then Peter said unto her, How is it that you have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord. Behold, the feet of them which have buried your husband are at the door and shall carry thee out.' Then she fell down straightway at his feet and yielded up the ghost, and the young men came in and found her dead, and carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.

And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things." Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we ask thy benediction also upon this address as we consider the awesome theme of the holiness of the Holy Spirit. Please be with us and please help us to treasure the person and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and lives and to live our lives in response in the holy fear of the Holy Spirit. Do not let us be Ananias and Sapphires, but let us be men of God, women of God, children of God, who may walk in the fear of the Holy Spirit all the day long. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well the topic before us this morning is one of utmost importance and gravity, one that is often ignored. Much talk is about the Father and the Son, much preaching about the Father and the Son, but little emphasis is given today, particularly in Reformed circles, on the Holy Spirit as the third person of the sacred Trinity, as the Nicene Creed says, the Lord and the giver of life. And who He is and what He does has an intimate bearing on every living person on this planet. Our lives in this world, our lives as citizens of the kingdom of God, and our future lives in heaven or hell with Christ or without His favor all depend on the ministry and the person of the Holy Spirit with regard to our souls and our bodies.

Now there is a profound mystery when it comes to understanding the Holy Spirit, His holiness, and His work. I still remember as a nine-year-old boy my dad saying to me one day, today I have to teach the children in catechism class about the Holy Spirit. He said, this is one of the most difficult of all lessons because the Holy Spirit is mysterious in a certain way, isn't He? He is like the wind that comes and goes. And we don't know where it's coming from or where it's going, we only can feel the effects.

You can't command the wind, you can't control the wind, you can't predict the wind, but you do know when the wind is blowing and so is the work of the Spirit, " Jesus said. Were it not for the Word of God, we wouldn't know anything about the Holy Spirit. But the Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit 100 times in the Old Testament and 250 times in the New Testament. As the Spirit of God, He appears already in the second verse of the Bible in the opening scene of creation. The Spirit of the Lord hovered over the face of the waters.

He is called throughout the Bible by God as my Spirit. He is called the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Jesus. But we know Him best as the Holy Spirit. Sometimes in the King James Version and older writers you will find that translated Holy Ghost, Ghost coming from the old Saxon word for spirit, much like the German, heist, or the Dutch, heist. English takes spirit and focuses more on spirit from the Latin word spiritus.

But ghost and spirit actually mean much the same thing. So when we read of the Holy Ghost in the New Testament, the phrase translates the same Greek words as Holy Spirit. The only difference perhaps between the two is that ghost refers to an invisible spirit, but the words spiritus and pneuma can also mean in addition to that breath or wind. In John 1-33, the KJV translators render John the Baptist's description of Christ as he which baptizes with the Holy Ghost, But the same word is translated Holy Spirit in John 3 verse 8. So Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost, we think of the same person, the same thing.

Now it's amazing that in the Old Testament we only read the word Holy Spirit three times. The first being in Psalm 51 where David is repenting and he prays, Take not thy holy spirit from me. The Holy Spirit therefore is linked to God's hatred of sin. He is confessing his sin that he committed with Bathsheba. And he says, against Thee only have I sinned because that's the primary person he sinned against, God Himself.

And the Holy Spirit is also connected there with making sinners holy. Take not Thy Holy Spirit from Me. We find it again in Isaiah 63. We find that we can vex or grieve the Holy Spirit. But then in the New Testament, 94 times the words Holy Spirit are used.

And so clearly Jesus Christ and His apostles want us to think when we think of the third person of the Trinity, the Spirit of Christ, as the Holy Spirit. Yet today if you listen to many Christians you would think that they rarely think about this Holy Spirit. Many today are like the disciples in Ephesus who had to admit, we've not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. Many think of the Spirit today as some kind of mystical force, a source of some kind of mystical experiences that are unscripturally grounded. But the Bible always brings in closest proximity Jesus Christ and His Spirit and the Word of God which is authored by the Spirit of God.

That, after all, is the major difference between Western Christendom and Eastern Christendom. They split in 1054 A.D. Because the West insisted that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ as well as the Spirit of the Father and not like the East where there's a separation between the Spirit of the Son and the Spirit of the Father in the sense that the Spirit does not flow out of the Son as well. That is a fatal error. Once you teach that you see then there's a certain kind of bifurcation between the Spirit and the Son and that is when you get into all kinds of mysticism that is unbiblical and all kinds of various sects that are divorced from the Word of God and from the Son of God.

The Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is always the Spirit of Christ. He's inseparable from the Son of God, as inseparable as He is from the Father, and He is always inseparable from the Word of God because the Word of God is Spirit-breathed. So again and again when we examine who we are and we examine our experiences before God We have to examine ourselves by the Spirit of God as He has recorded His Word in the Holy Bible. And so when it comes to the Holy Spirit there are really two main things to talk about when we think of the holiness of this Spirit. We think of His person.

He's essentially holy, as essentially holy as the Father and the Son. But we also think of His work. All that He does is holy. And so what I want to do in this brief hour is I want to look at the holiness of the Spirit's person, the holiness of His work, and then the applications of that holiness to our lives. So first then the holiness of the Spirit's person.

And we're going to look at this through the lens of Acts 5, one through 11, which has been read to you. At the end of Acts 4 we learn that some Christians in the church of Jerusalem were so moved by generosity that they sold their houses and lands and gave the money to the church to care for the needs of the poor. Barnabas was one of those. And in this way they showed their genuine reality of Christian love worked in them, as Peter says, by the Holy Spirit. But there were two church members, a husband and wife, Ananias and Sapphira, who saw this as an opportunity really for self-promotion.

And so in Acts 5 we are introduced to the idea of somehow giving something to God while keeping something back for yourself. These verses relate how Ananias and Sapphira sold some property but then they secretly kept back part of the money from the sale and brought the remainder of it to the apostles. Much to Ananias' surprise, Peter rebukes them not for keeping some of the money, for it was there as he said, and they had the right to dispose of it as they saw fit, verse 4, but for pretending to give the whole amount, pretending to be living in a way they weren't, pretending a sham religion. So he and his wife conspired to, quote, keep back part of their money because their intent was not to exercise Christian love but to make a name for themselves in the church. So they put on a front of making a great sacrifice to win the praise and acclaim of other Christians, but it was only a mask of hypocrisy.

And that sin was such a grievous offense against the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of integrity, the Spirit of authenticity, the Spirit of true piety, the Spirit of genuineness, that the Holy Spirit of God killed Ananias and Sapphira on the spot. You see the sin was not the amount. It was not the money per se. It was the motivation. It was the hypocrisy.

It was the falsity of what they were doing. So Peter asked a series of questions exposing the truth behind their lie. Why has Satan, verses 3 and 4, filled your heart to lie to the Holy Ghost and to keep back part of the price of the land? While it remained, was it not your own? After it was sold, was it not in your own power?

Why have you conceived this thing in your heart? You have not lied unto men, but unto God. And immediately Ananias falls down dead. Why? Why such a severe punishment?

Well, says Peter, he lied to the Holy Spirit. Now maybe you think, well doesn't that seem strange? I don't think Ananias was even thinking of the Holy Spirit here. Well, he wasn't. Actually, you know whenever we sin, we are not really thinking of God at that very moment, are we?

Stephen Sharnock, Puritan, said something amazing. He said, whenever you knowingly commit a sin of omission or commission, at that very moment you are playing the role of a practical atheist Because every sin is a confession at that very moment I believe that God is not. Because if you really believe in God and who He is and that holy majestic God we heard about throughout this conference so far. You would not dare to sin with impunity in His holy sight. So every moment we sin, every moment we play the role of hypocrite.

We are acting as if God did not exist. And so what Ananias did in the assembly of the church, he did also in the conscious presence of the Holy Spirit. All our acts of worship are offered in him and through him unto the living God. And so Ananias' gift was an offense to the holiness of God and it brought swift judgment from God. John Calvin put it this way, God cannot abide this unfaithfulness.

When it's bearing a show of holiness where there was none, we do mock Him contemptibly. Be not deceived. God is not mocked. God hates hypocrisy. So we must worship Him for His pleasure, never seeking the praise of men in our worship.

And there are many other cases like this as well in the Bible. You know them. Nadab and Abihu. The ark, the holy ark of the covenant as it came to the people of Bathsheimesh who looked into the ark. Uzzah, when he put out his hand on the holy ark and God struck him dead.

You see, this is not to say that everyone who dies suddenly has been punished by God for extreme sins. But the point is that God uses specific situations like these to communicate powerfully that He is present with the congregation and the leadership of the New Testament church and He is the Holy One of Israel. And you don't play games with the Holy Spirit of God. Well how does this story then reveal to us, and that's really our first major point, the person of the Holy Spirit? It does so in two ways.

First it tells us, doesn't it, that the Holy Spirit's holiness is His glory as God. Listen carefully to Peter's words. Verse 3, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Ghost? See, he's not lying to an impersonal force or thing. No one lies to a building or to electricity or to an it.

This question indicates that the Holy Spirit is a person. And then he confirms that in the next verse, you have not lied unto men but unto God. So he is saying when you combine verses three and four, the Holy Spirit is God of God, the third person of the Holy Trinity, and His Holiness, Ananias, is the Holiness of God. That's an important reason why he names himself the Holy Spirit. John Owens said that the title Holy Spirit respects His nature in the very first place and then secondly His operations.

So what is the holiness of God and of God's Spirit? Well we heard last night and rightly so that it is first of all God's otherness. He is completely distinct, completely separate. It is an absolute moral purity and otherness that is so holy and makes God so distinct from all his creatures that he's exalted above them in his infinite majesty. And that is true, you see, here of the Holy Spirit.

The holiness of the Holy Spirit and His essential being really involves three things. It involves this sense of separation from evil and sin because God's radical otherness, apartness from all that is creaturely, from all that is unclean, from all that is evil. But secondly, the holiness of God is not only separation, It's also sacrificial blood is the only way we can approach this holy God. There's no other way to approach it. That's the implication of God's holiness.

And Ananias and Sapphira are coming in their own strength. They are coming without blood. They are coming without the Lord Jesus Christ. They are coming on their own. And that is an abomination to the Holy Spirit of God.

There is only one way to come to God, to a holy God, and that is through the blood of His only Son revealed to our souls through the Word by the Spirit because the Spirit is always the Spirit of Christ, always taking in His holiness the things of the Holy Son and revealing them to us. But then thirdly, there is a thing, for lack of a better word, that I'm calling sacred intimacy. Separation from sin, sacrificial blood, but also sacred intimacy is inseparable from the Holy Spirit. Let me explain what I mean by that. When you come to God you cannot come to God without the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the One. He's the paraclete. He's the comforter. He's the sealer. He's the plier.

He's the sanctifier. He's the regenerator. He does all the work of God in your soul. And it's as if He by His hand introduces you to the Son of God who introduces you to the Father. And the way Thomas Goodwin the Puritan put it, it's by the Spirit we get to the Son and by the Son we get to the Father for there is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ the righteous.

And by that Holy Spirit we learn to sit down in sacred intimacy among the three persons of the Trinity and commune with them in a glorious, unspeakable, intimate communion. And you see that is inseparable from the holiness of the Holy Spirit. There's a wonderful story, boys and girls, of a boy who was a beggar on the street. And another boy came along and befriended him. And then the day came when that orphan boy, that fatherless, motherless boy, was taken by the boy's hand and brought past some guards and went right into the president's mansion.

And the president was Abraham Lincoln. The boy was the son of Lincoln. And he brought his little friend to his dad and he said, Dad, can this boy live in our house and be my friend and be part of our family? And Abraham Lincoln said yes. And he can have his own bedroom and he can have, just like you my son, he can eat every meal, He can sit at our table.

We will count Him as part of our family. And you see what is so amazing what happens is when the Holy Spirit takes a sinner and exposes him to his own hypocrisy and teaches him I'm no better than Ananias and Sapphira. I deserve to die as well. I deserve to fall down dead every moment because I'm a sinner before God. Orphaned from all that is good, separated from God, lost, hellbound, the Holy Spirit takes us, teaches us, convicts us, empties us of our righteousness, takes us as it were by the hand, leads us unto Jesus Christ.

And through Christ we have access to the Father and we are adopted into the family of God through faith, repentance, believing in Christ alone for salvation. And then we're brought into this sacred intimacy of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Son and the Holy Father, the greatest wonder there ever is. And once we taste that holiness, not only are we overwhelmed with the glory and the holiness of God, but we see God as essentially holy and separate and sacred and intimate in all His dealings with us. Jonathan Edwards said, holiness is God's permanent crown, His glory and His beauty. It is something, said Edwards, more than a mere attribute of God.

Holiness is the sum of all his attributes, the outshining of all that God is. Have you ever stood at Ocean's Edge? Maybe it was a sunset or a sunrise, but anyway you could see, you could see as the waves were coming in, this light, this light that was on top of every wave, dancing as it were on every wave. You see this beautiful sight of waves with, lightened by the sun. Well that's a picture of every attribute of God as it comes to us, as it's revealed to us.

Every, every attribute of God, every dimension of God's being, every aspect of His essential character is dancing as it were before us through the Word with a glittering light of His express holiness and sacredness. That's why Isaiah called him the Holy One 26 times in one book. No name is associated with God's name so much as the name of the Holy One. Well, this is what you see. Ananias and Sapphira did not really realize.

They had no knowledge, no experiential knowledge of the sacredness, no personal enjoyment of the beauty of God's holiness, No familiarity, holy familiarity with that glorious holiness. You know I was thinking as Paul Washer was speaking last night of just the wonder of what heaven will be as he brought us into those heavenly places that one day we will be able to gaze upon Him face to face. And we won't have to, even like the angels, cover our faces with our wings or with our arms or with our hands. And we won't just have furtive glances at God. Samuel Rutherford said, blinks and glances here because God is too holy.

You can't look into the sun. It's not good for your eyes. It will overwhelm you. It will blind you. But there we will be able to gaze upon Him face to face, says Revelation 19 verse 8.

What a wonder that will be. The Holy Spirit is going about through His person, through His work, through the Son of God all our lifetime from the moment He makes us born again to the moment we die preparing us to be a holy people for a holy Savior and a holy triune God for a holy place with a holy congregation with a holy eternal marriage with the Son of God. In our seminary recently we got a new Nigerian student. There was another student from Nigeria who introduced him to me. That student told me his name and the Nigerian student as he looked at me, he just glanced at me briefly and he looked away and he looked away as we were talking.

Suddenly the Nigerian student who had been around for three years, he said, no, no, he said, this is America. We do it different here. In Nigeria you're not allowed to look at your teacher for more than a split moment. But here in America It's an insult not to look at Him. You are to look at Him as He speaks to you.

So the poor man, he tried to look at me. He looked at me then for about a half a second and he looked away. Maybe two-thirds of a second he looked away. He could not, he could not do it. What you see one day in heaven because of this work of the Holy Spirit who will make us perfectly holy.

We will be able to look at our Father's face and not have to pull away and at the face of the Son of God and not pull away. There will be this beatific vision, this glorious, holy vision by the grace of the Holy Spirit and we shall be like him. We shall be as holy as Jesus is holy without spout or wrinkle or any such thing and he will see no sin in us and no transgression in his Jacob. And the wonder of wonders will become reality. This holy, beatific, utopian marriage will take place where the bride will be as holy as the bridegroom and forever live truly, happily ever after.

But you see, Ananias and Sapphira are abusing all of this, blaspheming all of this, rejecting all of this, spitting in the face of the holiness, the absolute holiness of God. And they drop down dead. So what's going on here? Well, the Holy Spirit is present. The Holy Spirit knows, first of all, the secrets of men.

He's omniscient, you see. He's the holy, Divine Spirit. Imagine the shock on Ananias' face when the apostle told him what he had secretly planned and done. The Spirit searches all things, says Paul. Yea, the deep things of God.

But secondly, the Holy Spirit delights in absolute truth. He is faithful. The contrast between God and man is stark in Peter's charge here. He's the Spirit of truth. God is not a man that He should lie.

God has even said there is no part in the kingdom of heaven for liars. God hates falsehood. And Thirdly the Holy Spirit shows His deity here by His hatred of the sins of men. He too is a consuming fire. Sin grieves Him says Paul to the Ephesians, not with the grief of a helpless victim but with the grief of the Holy One who is the enemy of all moral evil.

That is why Isaiah 63, 10 says that the old covenant Israel rebelled and vexed His Holy Spirit. Therefore He was turned to be their enemy and He fought against them." You see the Spirit blasts sinners as the searing, dry, dusty desert wind withers the delicate flowers of the grass says Isaiah 40. It's a dreadful thing to grieve the Holy Spirit of God. There's no more sure way to do that than to exercise religious hypocrisy for it is the greatest of lies. The death of Ananias and Sapphira are a lesson for us, a sober warning that God will not tolerate any phoniness in us.

And if we don't repent of it sooner or later, our end will be terrible. And then fourthly, this shows us the person of the Holy Spirit also and that He controls the lives of men. He's omnipotent. He's omnipotent. The instant Ananias heard Peter's rebuke, the hypocrite fell down and died.

Lloyd-Jones said this is no mere heart attack, No mere stroke induced by the force of Peter's words for the same thing happened moments later to Sapphira. This is nothing less, said Lloyd-Jones, than the breaking in of the unseen and the eternal Holy Spirit. This man and woman thought they were just having a meeting with Peter about some financial matters and suddenly they discover they are in the presence of the Most High God. And that presence teaches us that you and I are always every moment of our life, every step of our life, we are always every man, every woman, every child in the sovereign grasp of God and He gives life, He takes it away at His will. B.

B. Warfield once said, the Calvinist is the man who believes that the stepping of God is everywhere in the whole horizon of his life, that he never does anything, goes anywhere, says anything, thinks any thoughts without the presence of God. God is always there. God is always present. God is always seeing what we're doing.

What an amazing thing. The Holy Spirit knows you far better than you know yourself. Never, never think of the Holy Spirit as a mere sweet and comfortable power or feeling or an it. Though He does give comfort, of course, to God's children or as a mere angel, though of course He is swifter, more powerful than any angel, but He is the holy deity of God, that very God we heard about last night and of Him too it is said exult ye the Lord our God and worship at His footstool for He is holy. But also this teaches us that the Holy Spirit's holiness opposes the spirit of this world.

He's directly opposed to another Spirit. Verse 3 says, Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit? You see like Judas Ananias has become an instrument of the devil. What we have here is not just a church member lying to a church officer. But what we have here is a conflict between two spirits.

I would even dare to say two kingdoms. The power of Satan in opposition to the power of the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit anoints Jesus Christ with power to rescue those oppressed by the devil, Acts 10 says. And Satan counter attacks by attempting the overthrow of Christ's kingdom with his lies as we see in Acts 13 and in many other places in this book. And so the Holy Spirit is constantly waging war against the demonic Spirit getting the victory over Satan.

After all, he is only a fallen angel and the Holy Spirit is very God of very God. And so the Spirit of God fills the church with a holy power to speak the truth and the grace to live a godly life. But it's a satanic power that wants to fill the church with a lie and an ungodly life and worldliness. And so through Ananias and Sapphira The devil attempts to raise up hypocrites within the church and the Holy Spirit crushes the demonic scheme in its very New Testament beginnings. And that is very comforting for the church of God That the conflict between Satan and the Holy Spirit reveals that the Holy Spirit is able to destroy the powers of evil.

John Owen said, The Spirit is represented as the Holy Spirit because of the opposition made between him and every unclean and unholy spirit. So there's always an antithesis, you see, between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of this world, The Spirit of our old nature, the Spirit of sin, the Spirit of the flesh, the Spirit of the devil. And that's why John said try the spirits whether they be of God, whether they be of the Holy Spirit, yes or no. And that's why Paul said we have received now not the Spirit of the world but the Spirit which is of God. So there is something essential in the very being of the Holy Spirit that both unites and divides.

All who are united to Christ by living faith, the Holy Spirit unites, unites them to holiness, grows holiness, prepares them for glory. And that may not be yoked together with evil. Not only in marriage are we not to be unequally yoked. But every day in our lives we are not to be unequally yoked with the spirit of this world, the spirit of sin, the spirit of the flesh. And That's why a Christian has no business sinning.

An old elder in my church has passed away now, but his dad used to say to him, Son, if you're born again, you should reckon yourself dead unto sin, Romans 6-10, and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. And that means, son, you've got no business sinning. When you're a Christian and sin comes and knocks on your door and you open the door and you see it, you've got to shut the door because you've got to say, I'm a Christian. I'm separated to Jesus Christ. I have no business sinning.

The problem with so many of us, and so prone to live in all of our hearts, is that we don't quite go out directly and run directly into sin, but we leave a little window, open window space in our lives. We don't shut the window completely against all known sin. And we flirt just a little bit and it destroys so much of our holiness, so much of our daily life with God. Be not unequally yoked together. The holiness of the Spirit's person must express itself in the holiness of the Spirit's work in our lives.

Which then leads me to my second of two major thoughts. The holiness of the Spirit's work is a necessary outflow of the holiness of the Spirit's person. And you see that throughout this passage as well in two major ways also. The first is the Holy Spirit's holiness sanctifies the church. They call that, of course, sanctification, making holy.

I wish that the English had a word instead of sanctification, which many people don't understand. I wish they had the word that the Dutch have. The Dutch have heiligmakien, Holy making. That's what sanctification is. Holy making.

And all three persons of the Trinity are involved in this. But it's peculiarly the work of the Holy Spirit in exercise of infinite love of that Spirit, patient love, to continue to work that sanctifying work in the hearts of unworthy sinners in the midst of an unworthy church. And so the Holy Spirit is as willing, as faithful, as eager as the Father and as the Son to take the things of Christ and to show them to sinners and to do this sanctifying work and prepare us for glory. And so you notice in this chapter that the Spirit sanctifies the church in two ways. He purges the church of hypocrisy, number one, and He produces the fear of God in her members, Number two.

So he purges the church. He removes two wicked hypocrites from her membership. It's a severe judgment. But it's a severe mercy to the church. If their hypocrisy had been left unchecked, Imagine how many innocent people might have looked to these two as examples of godliness.

Perhaps even appointed Ananias to be some deacon or elder in the church. Maybe they would have given him diaconal care. After all he gave all this money to the church, like the seven men who would soon be chosen. But you see, the Holy Spirit came, and he showed their hypocrisy. The word Ananias, by the way, in Greek means the Lord shows grace, and Sapphira means beautiful, and was the name of a number of wealthy Jewish women in the first century.

But their lives were diametrically opposed to their names as well. Their hypocrisy could have quietly infected the church as some imitated it, as others became disillusioned and cynical. So it was a grace from God, the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit removed them. But secondly, Luke writes in verse 11 in this chapter that great fear, great fear came upon all the church. Now there are, of course, as you know, two kinds of the fear of God.

Slavish fear and childlike, sometimes called filial fear. Unbelievers fear the Lord only insofar as they desire to avoid punishment, not because they love or trust the Lord. The living church fears the Lord with a hearty love for His holiness and a trust in His goodness. True, it is mingled with true awe and reverence for His majesty, but it's not a slavish fear. Boys and girls, it's sort of like you.

Picture you sinning badly against your mom. You'd feel terrible, wouldn't you? Your mom has done so much for you, or your dad, and you've sinned against your parents, you feel so bad, you respect them, you have reverence for them, you love them, and it grieves you, and your conscience can't rest. You see, that's a childlike fear. Now let's say you're 18 years old and you've got your driver's license and you're driving down the highway and a policeman stops you and says you were going 10 miles over the speed limit.

And he gives you a ticket. Well you'll have a certain fear too, won't you, when the cop pulls you over? But I don't think you'll say to the policeman, oh, Mr. Policeman, I feel so bad in my heart. It grieves me so much that I hurt you today.

It hurts your feelings because I love you so much." Well you respect the policeman but you don't have the love relationship that you have with your mom and dad. And you are worried more about the consequences. How many points are going to be taken off of my driver's license and how much money do I have to pay. You see that's how an unconverted person feels when he gets caught sinning by God, red-handed, and gets punished. He treats God like a policeman.

But when you love God, well you have this childlike fear. And you see, this great fear came upon all the church. No doubt it was a mixed fear. No doubt there were some that feared slavishly. Others feared childlike.

But all fear, childlike, slavish, the great fear that came upon this church God used for His own purposes. But the primary accent here is on this. A fear that is completely compatible with love. A fear that looks upon God and His covenant commitment to us. A fear that coincides with a God who will never forsake the work of His own hands and who will do us good forever.

That fear predominates and we should welcome that kind of fear. We should pray for that kind of fear. That's the fear the Holy Spirit plants in our heart and makes it grow there. The fear of the Lord, the childlike fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It's the foundation of mental health.

John Brown said that fear can simply be defined as this, fearing the smiles and the frowns of God to be of greater weight and value than the smiles and frowns of men." You see, the purging away of hypocrites and the instilling of great fear in the church is the work of the Holy Spirit because He is holy. And so He makes God's people holy, and He works this holiness and this godly holy fear in their soul. I am the Lord which sanctify you. I, the Lord who sanctify you, am holy. Leviticus 20 and 21.

So the Holy One, the Holy Ghost comes and puts this fear in our hearts as a fruit of our union with the Lord Jesus Christ. Through events in our lives, through His Word, through divine providences, He grows that fear. He grows that fear. When that fear diminishes in your life, that childlike fear, that's what we call backsliding. It means you're moving further away from God in His favorable presence.

And you are in grave danger. You are in grave danger and you need to return. You need to repent afresh and return to God and have that daily consciousness of God everywhere. That God sees you. That God knows you.

And you want to live unto Him and you want to obey Him and fear Him and love Him and reverence Him and adore Him. He is the compass of your entire life. He fills the horizon of your life. That's what the fear of God does for you. Boys and girls, there was once two little girls named Edna and Mary, and they had to carry some cookies, their mother said, to their grandma.

And their mother said, make sure you don't take a cookie along the way. And so they carry their cookies. And they're halfway to the grandma's house and Edna says to Mary, oh boy, I'm really getting hungry. And Mary says, yeah, I'm hungry too. And Edna says, I wonder what those cookies taste like.

Mary says, well, Mom cooked them, they've got to be good. Mom baked them, they got to be good. And so Edna says, I don't think mom and mine too much if we just had one, grandma would never know. Oh that's right, said Mary, maybe we could just have one. So they set the cookie jug down on the ground and they got around and Edna began to lift up the cover.

And suddenly Mary said, Edna, there's someone here. Edna quickly covers the cookies and she says, where, where? Ah, says Mary, God is here. God is here. And you see, that childlike fear of God, the presence of God, is not just to scare us, But also as believers we need it.

It also deters us from sin as believers. And so we need the awareness of God wherever, wherever we go. And when a society and a church and a so-called God-fearing family and our own souls lose the consciousness of the fear of God like Ananias and Sapphira did. We are on our way to total ruination and self-destruction. But then secondly, the Holy Spirit in His work also convicts the world.

He produced a great fear of God, says Luke, that affected the broader community. Great fear came upon quote, as many as heard these tidings. So not just believers. The text speaks of an engendered fear in many unbelievers in Jerusalem and the surrounding region. As many as heard these things.

This was no accident. But it's the Spirit's purpose to awaken the neighbors of Christians to the reality of God, to convict them of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. And that's why it's so critical to view every unconverted person as a mission field and to try to evangelize them and bring them God's Word. There are three things we have going for us. Three things the Holy Spirit has going for him when he spreads this conviction also to the unsaved.

Number one, everyone has a conscience that speaks. Everyone has a conscience that speaks. Number two, God's acts of divine providence speak even to the unbeliever. When God does something amazing in the earth, when God sent 9-11 to us 14 years ago, The next Sunday there were thousands of more people in church. It didn't last with many of them.

But there is a fear of God that is lying latent in the natural conscience that gets pricked with acts of divine providence. And then there is, of course, the powerful thing that can change lives and transform them, the very Word of God. So when you speak to someone, you need to do like the Holy Spirit. You need to work with their conscience, work with acts of providence, and then try to bring them the Word of God and show them that that Word is powerful and can change their lives and can bring them into this sweet and beautiful childlike fear of God. So what is the Holy Spirit doing in this story?

Well, number one, He is protecting the church from hypocrites. Number two, He is honoring the church in the sight of the community. And number three, he is attracting sinners to the church in its outward ministry. The Spirit does an amazing work, a holy work, because He's a holy person who does a holy work. Now let me apply that then by way of conclusion in several quick ways.

I'm going to just give you eight quick ways, A through H for the boys and girls so you can remember them easily. Number one, appreciation. We have got to learn to appreciate the Holy Spirit and His work. To admire Him for His patience in working with us, for His patience in teaching us the same lessons again and again and again. Let us thank God every day for the Spirit and His saving work in us, in our families, and in our churches.

Do you understand If it weren't for the Holy Spirit there would never ever be the least spark of grace of God's work in your soul. You would be on your way to hell. You would perish forever. Be boldness. Boldness and beauty.

Let us see the beauty of the work of the Holy Spirit and make us bold, as Paul says, to have access to the Father and the Son by the spirit. The Greek word that he uses there in Romans 5 to you about access actually means, according to the dictionary, entrance to the king through the favor of another. Paul says it so beautifully, through Him, that is through Christ, we have access by one Spirit unto the Father. In whom, as in Christ, we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him. What a glorious thing it is.

Every time we may go to God in prayer with true access and truly pray and feel communion with God, it is the work of the Triune God. All prayer is the work of the Triune God. It comes from the Father's decree. It's merited by the Son. It's worked in our soul by the Spirit who groans within us, groanings that are unutterable and it goes back up through the Son who salts it and sanctifies it with his own merits and presents it back to the Father.

Glorious chain of prayer in every access. The Spirit is co-laboring with our Spirit in the presence of the Son of God. The beauty of this work is that the Holy Spirit comes solo that no one, not the smallest child, not the greatest sinner is considered a hopeless case for this Holy Spirit. But everyone is invited to have access by the Spirit through Christ to the Father. The great theologian Charles Hodge when he went to Princeton Seminary and they showed him the home that he would live in, they said, Mr.

Hodge, we will change anything you want changed in this home, because we want you to be well pleased. And Dr. Hodge walked through the entire home. They didn't know what he was thinking. Finally, he saw the entire home, and they said, are there any changes you want to have made?

And Had said, just one. My study door. The knob is too high for my youngest child. Would you please lower the door knob because I want all my children to have access to me 24 hours a day every day of the week. What an illustration of the Holy Spirit.

He brings the knob low through the Word, through inviting us, through indicting prayer that we may have access and freeness by the Spirit to go to the Lord at all times. You know, when I was nine years old, my dad sat me down one day and he said, son, do you want to really know what the difference is between a believer and an unbeliever? And I said, yes, dad. He said, well, I'm going to write it with an iron pin on your heart and you'll never forget it. And he did.

And this is what he said. If you're a believer, you always have a place to go. You always have a God to go to through the Holy Spirit's work. He opens the door to the throne of grace. Mary Winslow said to her son, Octavius, the way to come by the Spirit into God's presence is to tell the Lord everything about you as if He knew nothing about you, yet knowing He always knows everything about you.

Tell Him everything. Pour out your heart before Him with boldness, freeness, access because of Christ but do it by the Spirit who groans within you. See comprehensiveness. There's something beautiful about the comprehensive person and work of the Holy Spirit who takes the things of Christ and reveals them to you. Calvin was called the theologian of the Spirit.

The Puritans followed him. The Puritans were Trinitarian shaped in all their theology. It was always the Father and the Son and the Spirit. The Spirit was never left out of the picture of any of their theology. Calvin said every aspect of theology is conjoined with the Spirit's work and role.

He's involved in creation, in the cosmos, in the Christian life, in ethics, in the church and sacraments, in preaching, in every area of the Christian's life. No area is left untouched by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. We need to appreciate that more. The comprehensive role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. De-dependency.

We are absolutely dependent upon the Holy Spirit in all that we do. Small things in life, big things in life. In our tradition, before a minister gets on the pulpit, he stands at the bottom of the pulpit steps. Everyone is quietly praying in the congregation. Of course, the minister is praying as well.

I have often thought to myself in that 30 seconds of prayer, I am so glad the congregation doesn't know the poverty, the poverty of my prayers as I am about to go on the pulpit in all my weakness and yet in my expectancy that the Spirit will strengthen me and give me words of comfort and wisdom and conviction. But my prayers are sometimes a mess. Sometimes I can scarcely concentrate. I am overwhelmed. I am going to be an ambassador of Jesus Christ.

What can I say? And sometimes all I can say at the bottom of the pulpit is, power Lord, power, power, power, Holy Spirit, give me the Holy Spirit. What an embarrassingly poor prayer I often thought. And then one day I was reading George Whitefield's journals and he said before I go on the pulpit, he said, sometimes my mind is so confused and I'm so distraught, I'm so overwhelmed, All I can pray is power, power, power. See yes, that's it.

It's dependency on the Holy Spirit and the Lord takes our foolish prayers. He understands our intent and He gives what you need by the Holy Spirit. And then there is E. I couldn't decide so I'm going to give you two here. Entertainment and expectancy.

Entertainment is a strange word you say, but that's what Richard Sibbes the Puritan said. We must entertain the Holy Spirit. What he meant by that was just as a family your family will get ready for other people to come over and you'll clean house and you'll prepare food you get ready to entertain them in your home and to visit with one another and to enjoy the fellowship. So believers should use the means of grace, preparing their souls, as it were, for the cohabitation of the Holy Spirit, Inviting the Spirit to come as you open the Scriptures. Inviting the Spirit to come as you fellowship with the children of God.

Inviting the Spirit to join you as you journal your spiritual struggles. Inviting the Spirit to come into you in fullness as you go up to the house of God. Entertain the Holy Spirit and do it with expectancy because He delights to use the spiritual disciplines and the means of grace as vehicles through which He Himself fills you and overflows you and causes you to rejoice in the things of Jesus Christ. There's such an expectancy our forefathers had that sometimes it's embarrassing to us today. John Welsh, the son-in-law of John Knox, who was such a prayer warrior, used to pray every night for revival.

His wife said after he died, she often overheard him praying aloud in the next room, Lord, Lord, Holy Spirit, give me Scotland, give me Scotland, praying for revival for every person of the 3, 000 in this congregation but also the entire nation. The Holy Spirit is able to do great things. He's able to send reformation and revival. Plead with Him, beg Him, wrestle with Him, send reformation and revival in my heart, my family, my church, my nation, this world." And then F, fullness. There's something about the Spirit that is fulsome.

His gifts are full. Pentecost is full. The wind filled the house where the followers of Jesus were sitting. It filled our hearts. It's this fullness that we need today of the things of God, the presence of God, the glory of God, the beauty of God.

The old Puritans used to compare it to sail boating. They said the Holy Spirit when He blows He is like a sailboat in full gale where the sails are curved like that And the boat is speeding along. He says this is what the church needs today. Give us the fullness of the Spirit. Lord, come, come Holy Spirit, come north and south wind and blow on the garden of my heart.

Come and let the garden of the church and the world smell the sweet spices of the church. And then G, go, go. Go out and proclaim the beauty, the beautiful holiness of the Holy Spirit. Don't grieve, don't grieve. Go but don't grieve the Holy Spirit.

Go out and ask, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? How can my life honor the work rather than grieve the person of the Holy Spirit? And then finally, H, holiness. Pursue holiness, cultivate holiness, seek holiness, pray for holiness, Despise the uncleanness of this world, the uncleanness of your old nature. Pursue holiness in the strength of the Holy Spirit and live in the consciousness.

If you're a believer, that you have a holy guest who has residence in your home and in your heart at all times. I will close with William Perkins. William Perkins said this, if we believe in the Holy Ghost and there upon do persuade ourselves that He will dwell in us. We must daily labor as we are commanded to keep ourselves in holiness and honor to the Lord. And the reason is good.

If a man be to entertain, here is the word again, entertain, But an earthly prince or some man of state, he would be sure to have his house in a readiness and all matters in order against his coming, so as everything might be pleasing unto so worthy a guest. How much more then should we not put our lives in order and make all things as pleased as possible for the heavenly guest who dwells in us, the Holy Spirit of God, a person infinitely greater than all the kings and all the kingdoms of this world. May we treasure, may we love the beauty of the Holy Spirit and His holiness and work in our lives, in our families, our church, our nation, and may we covet it, may we covet earnestly the best gift, the Holy Spirit of God, who takes the things of Christ and reveals them unto us. Let us pray. Great God of heaven, we thank thee so much for the Holy Spirit.

Our lives would be a sham without Him. They would be no different than Ananias and Sapphira. Oh, deliver us, Lord, from every hypocrisy. Help us not to grieve the Holy Spirit. Help us to repent immediately, to run to the Savior with every known sin, and to cry out for mercy.

Spirit of God, make us more holy, more imitators of the Father, more of the mind of the Spirit, more conformed to the image of the Son, make us more like thyself. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Ncfic.org where you can keep up to date on what is new as well as find articles, videos, audio sermons and much more at no charge. The N-C-F-I-C exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for both church and family life.