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workingontruth · 5 years

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quench

verb (used with object)

to put out or extinguish (fire, flames, etc.).

to cool suddenly by plunging into a liquid, as in tempering steel by immersion in water.

Recently, I am being reminded of the myriad ways we can quench the Holy Spirit from our lives. This is not to focus on how bad we can be, but to remind ourselves that we need the Spirit’s daily assistance to lay ourselves down in preference to his leading – in all things.

If you don’t think we have the ability to overpower the movement of the God of the universe in your life, why would these verses exist?

Acts 7:51, I Thessalonians 5:19 & Ephesians 4:30

Self-Confidence:

This is a big one. I can crowd God from the scene of my life by simply being over confident in myself. It’s easy to forget what the Bible says about me.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” – John 15:5

Living in what I would sometimes call ‘my own abilities, I can forget that I cannot bring anything to the table that could glorify the Lord Jesus in myself without those “things” being both rooted in and originating from Him.

I read something a very godly man said once that has stuck with me. In reflecting on this ability we have to DO things that seem good and important born out of the flesh, he said:

“The Lord has shown me that I can do anything, but that he has said, ‘Apart from me ye can do nothing.’ So it comes to this, that everything I have done and can do apart from him is nothing!”

And we, too, have to come to that valuation. I don’t mean to say we cannot do a lot of things–we can. We can schedule and execute meetings, we can build churches, we can go to the ends of the earth and found missions, and we can seem to bear fruit; but remember that the Lord’s word is:

“Every plant which my heavenly Father planted not, shall be rooted up.” - Matthew 15:13

God is the only legitimate Originator in the universe (Gen. 1:1), and his Holy Spirit is the only legitimate initiator in our hearts. Anything you and I plan and set into motion without Him has the taint of the flesh upon it, and it will never reach the realm of the Spirit–however earnestly we seek God’s blessing on it.

I’m now at a point where I really want time and activity invested into things that are of maximum eternal consequence according to the Lord…not according to my estimation of value. What about you?

Willful Disobedience:

It is true that sin puts up a barrier between us and God, and cuts us off from the fellowship He wants us to have with Him. The Bible says,

“But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.” - Isaiah 59:2

Now we have to be careful here to not interpret this to say that God is turning his back on us. He is always ready to restore our fellowship with him. What’s more, and to be clear, if we belong to Jesus, nothing can terminate our relationship with him. But relationship and fellowship are two very different things (possibly more on this on another occasion).

So, the point of Isaiah 59:2 is not that God cuts us off and refuses to have anything more to do with us – not at all. He wants us to come back to Him and have our fellowship with Him restored – and He does everything He can to wake us up and bring us to repentance.

But in any case, when we do our own thing and go our own way regardless of God’s precepts which serve as guardrails for us, we are choosing to quench the Holy Spirit’s influence in and over our lives. We are consciously saying,

“I got this, God. I don’t need you to get my back. My sin is going to give me greater joy than living in fellowship with you.”

That’d be crazy to say, yes? Nonetheless, it’s what we are saying with our disobedience and attempts to self-fulfill. No, we must not let willful sin come between us and God. The longer it goes on, the more the devil rejoices – for he is neutralizing one of God’s arsenal.

Reliance Upon Our Money:

In America, we fight an amazingly fragile and uphill battle for our faith.

When we’re physically uncomfortable or a bit emotionally needy, what do we do? We spend money in our possession to appease our desires, regaining a satisfactory level of comfort. And we move on.

In doing so, we, in the least case, quench the Spirit without knowing it–leading to ineffectual lives in the Spirit; in the worst case, we fall into sinful patterns of complacency leading to spiritual deadness.

As we see many times throughout the history of our faith, Nehemiah summarizes this human propensity well.

“But as soon as they were at rest, they again did what was evil in your sight. Then you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies so that they ruled over them. And when they cried out to you again, you heard from heaven, and in your compassion you delivered them time after time. – Nehemiah 9:28

On our own, we become spiritually complacent when prosperous. This propensity is less a character flaw than a natural predisposition for those of us with skin on. Prosperity has a way of bringing us to a place of self-confidence and self-trust. It’s in our DNA.

“Look what I have accomplished,” we say.

This all too quickly turns us into spiritual midgets. This spiritual self-life then leads us into a place of spiritual complacency. And God being a jealous God, abandons us to our own demise–that we would yet again recognize our insufficiency without Him in order that we would once more, like the stoutly disciplined Israelites, return to Him with all our heart.

But, I’m afraid in America and in other places where we have the ability to self-medicate with earthly indulgences, we continually salve God’s chastening discomfort with something less than himself. Thus, we end up living terribly uninspiring lives, and we quench him from the communion he desires to have with us. Money can do this.

Weak Expectations:

Because we don’t know God very well, we tend to live with a low bar of spiritual expectancy. We live as if this world were our home. We live as if we don’t know there is a spiritual and intangible reality going on all around us–24 hours a day.

Understandably, we don’t connect very easily with what doesn’t slap us in the face.

Maybe part of our incalculably weak expectation of God is because we were never really discipled into knowing who we are in Christ. We have, even before looking out the window into our new reality as ones redeemed unto God, had our eyelids pulled shut over the supernatural eyes given us when we became children of God! As a result, we have continually quenched Him with our low bar of expectation and what ends up continuing to be our love of the world.

Perhaps part of our problem is that we feel we must be content with our lives.

We think we are being, as Paul requests that we be, satisfied with what we have–thus honoring and bringing glory to God. But in doing so, we are misinterpreting Paul is saying in Philippians 4:11.

Paul is speaking of being content with the worldly comforts and provisions in our borrowing possession. He is not talking about our being satisfied in our relationship with God! Our Lord’s heartbreak is NOT that our desire for something more is too strong, but too weak.

When our satisfaction stops at the comforts and pleasures of this world (God’s gifts) we become malnourished as Christians.

Here is C.S. Lewis’ take:

The crazy irony of our human condition is that God has put us within sight of the Himalayas of his glory in Jesus Christ [through deep fellowship with the Holy Spirit], but we have chosen to pull down the shades of our chalet and show slides of Buck Hill… We are content to go on making mud pies in the slums because we cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

And then there’s the brilliant and unfathomably deep introspection from theologian, Steven Curtis Chapman:

I'm playing Gameboy standing in the middle of the Grand Canyon I'm eating candy sitting at a gourmet feast I'm wading in a puddle when I could be swimming in the ocean

Seriously though, isn’t that true?

Instead, to stop quenching the Holy Spirit’s impact onto our souls, we must raise our bar of expectancy for the Almighty God and let our soul pant after Him as ones who are simply not satisfied with what this world has to offer.

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with

God? – Psalm 42:1-2

I don’t think God would condemn or turn a blind eye to this kind of hunger for more of himself. No, our bar of expectation is not too high, but too low. And just resting in our Christian zone of goodness has just got to break God’s heart. It certainly quenches his Spirit within us.

And the list could go on….

Insufficient Time in the Word

Lack of a Kingdom Citizen Mindset

Not Understanding the Death of our Old Adam

Not Allowing God to be LORD in our Lives

But, alas, the point of this entry was to remind us that we are completely incapable of loving, fellowshipping and serving God when we are keeping Him at arm’s length–for any number of reasons. …and that we can keep Him at arm’s length!

Only the awakened and nourished Holy Spirit within us can keep the soil of our lives tillable - that we may walk in tandem with Jesus.

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