The Holy Spirit makes you live right. Being born of the Holy Spirit exempts you from having struggles in your flesh. Walking in the Spirit is incidental to being filled with the Holy Spirit.
None of those statements are true. They are misconceptions about the Holy Spirit and His work in our life.
Perhaps the greatest miracle we can experience in life is to become born again through faith in Christ. That’s because through that experience, we become a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). But after that life-changing experience, some Christians have a rude awakening about the Holy Spirit. It is that even with the Holy Spirit, we can still choose to walk in the flesh. He does not make us do the right thing but empowers us to do so.
In His letter to the church at Corinth, Paul the apostle writes, “Walk by the Spirit, and you shall not carry out the desire of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16, NASB). The message in this verse is that Christians must chose to walk by the Spirit, in order to avoid carrying out the desires of the flesh. If they don’t do the former, they will fail to accomplish the latter.
It is true that through the Holy Spirit, God empowers our life to live for Him. But it’s still a matter of choice. It gives God no pleasure to impart an experience in our life that makes us live for Him even when our heart is far from Him. He wants us to live for Him because we choose to and not because we have no choice but to do so. But the latter scenario seems to be what some people want from the Holy Spirit.
The bottom line is that Spirit-led and Spirit-empowered living only happen when we choose to walk in step with the Holy Spirit.
The Source of Misconceptions about the Holy Spirit
Misconceptions about the Holy Spirit originate from church—of course. The Holy Spirit plays a phenomenal role in the life of believers. That’s why the Bible reveals so much information about the Holy Spirit in the life of believers. Those who minister the Word of God must be diligent to accurately teach these abundant truths to minimize misconceptions about the Holy Spirit.
Many years ago, a popular teaching among some Pentecostals was that if a person did not speak in other tongues, he was not saved. Pentecostals who believed that questioned the salvation of other believers solely based on whether or not they spoke in other tongues. But the Bible clearly teaches that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ (Ephesians 2:8).
One Pentecostal pastor told me, early in my ministry, that the only way I could become saved is by leaving the church I belonged to and becoming a member of his so-called “holiness” church. That is absolute nonsense. Absolutely no church or denomination has a monopoly on the Holy Spirit!
We can’t fathom the depth or the breadth of the works of the Holy Spirit available to us. But they are not happenstance. We will harness the benefits of those amazing works only to the extent that we are willing to walk in accordance with the truth and not misconceptions about Holy Spirit.
Copyright © 2023 by Frank King. All rights reserved.