Taught by the Spirit

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One night this week, as we were getting ready for VBS to get started, somebody called Charla and said they were making a coffee run. Did I want anything from such and such coffee shop? And I had to laugh because my wife doesn’t like me to go into those places.

Not because she’s against them, but because I don’t know how to work them. I walk into a fancy coffee shop and I turn into my grandfather. um I remember and she likes going places like that I remember when we were dating getting to a coffee shop before she did and I walked in there’s what can we get you okay I’d like coffee you already see where this is going uh they start telling me we’ve got kenya zimbabwe timbuktu what you know whatever kona and I’m saying I came here for coffee do you have coffee they list the things again I there’s a down in communication somewhere.

This is not working. So more than once I’ve told, what do you call them, a barista? Is that what they’re called?

Somebody help me out. All right. More than once I’ve told them, you know how I can walk into Brahms and for $1.

29 they pour the stuff out of the metal container? What do you have that’s like that? So she doesn’t like me to order.

I embarrassed myself. I remember being with her one time and somebody asked me if I wanted a vente. I thought they were speaking Spanish.

I told them, no, I just want one. If you don’t catch that, that’s the Spanish word for 20. She said, no, that’s the size.

Those menus, and she’s always gotten me things that I like, but those menus are incomprehensible to me. I don’t know why. I just have a mental block against understanding what’s on.

And some of you love those coffee shops, no judgment here, I’m just saying I don’t understand how they work or what any of those words mean, to the point that she either has to order for me or tell me exactly what to say. When we started dating, I put her coffee order as a note under her contact in my phone. And so I know that when I go into a fancy coffee shop, I am supposed to order either a decaf caramel macchiato or a grande cold brew with three pumps of classic and sweet cream cold foam.

I have no idea what any of those words mean, right? But I’ve got it because she has translated that menu for me. And so I laughed about that when somebody asked, did I want something from the coffee shop?

I said, just tell them I appreciate the thought, but they don’t want to open that can of worms. The confusion that I feel looking at a menu at a fancy coffee shop gives me some insight into what Paul is describing and how the unbeliever feels when trying to navigate the depths of God’s word. We may get some idea, like I know the menu is coffee, I think. I know there’s coffee somewhere on the menu, but I don’t know what all these things mean.

And the unbeliever may be able to look at the Bible and discern some things from it, but to really get to the depths of God’s Word, to really get the deep truths out of there, we cannot do it without somebody who, like my wife, translates the menu for me. We cannot do it without the Holy Spirit making the Scriptures make sense to us. And so we’ve been going through the book of 1 Corinthians the last several weeks, and we’re in chapter 2 today.

We’re in the second part of chapter 2. And when we come to this part, Paul has just been talking about how the gospel doesn’t make sense to the world. Not that people are incapable of understanding it, but that the gospel doesn’t make sense to the way the world thinks.

It doesn’t fit what the world would expect a message from God to be. And in fact, in our day, we still hear the misunderstanding that, oh, I’m supposed to do things. I’m supposed to earn things.

Oh, if I go to church, they’re just going to tell me to work harder and try harder and be better. That’s good, but that’s not really the message of the gospel. The message of the gospel is that we can’t try hard enough, we can’t be good enough, Jesus had to do it for us.

And that’s so antithetical to the way the world thinks that God’s message would be. So we come to the point that Paul made in the previous section of the letter that we looked at, where he said, don’t think that just because the gospel is simple, that it’s only simple. He said to the world, it looks foolish.

It looks like it doesn’t make sense. It’s actually a very simple message about Christ crucified, but the implications of the gospel are deeper than we can ever imagine. That’s what we talked about last week.

But he says to those who are mature, those who have grown in the faith, those who have the Holy Spirit ministering to them are gradually come to be able to understand deeper concepts of the word. And as we move into the section we’re going to look at this morning, he talks about the role that the Holy Spirit plays in helping us understand the deeper truths, the deeper applications of the gospel. And it’s important that we understand the role of the Holy Spirit here, or else we’ll get a self-righteous, self-important streak that we think we’re better than the world outside because we can understand the Scriptures.

Listen, I don’t understand the Scriptures because I’m brilliant, if I am. I understand the Scriptures to the extent I understand them because the Holy Spirit has taught me those things through years of walking with Jesus. If you’re walking with Jesus, the Holy Spirit will continue to teach you for as long as you’re on this earth and studying the Scriptures.

You’re not going to just learn them by them floating around out there in the air. You actually have to study them. But the Holy Spirit is the one who gives you understanding.

That’s what we’re going to look at today is Paul discussing how we find this wisdom in the Scriptures, these applications of the gospel through the Holy Spirit. So if you would, turn with me to 1 Corinthians 2. We’re going to look at verses 10 through 16 this morning, 1 Corinthians chapter 2.

If you don’t have a Bible with you this morning or you can’t find 1 Corinthians, that’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you. But whatever text you have, whether it’s in your hand or on the screen, once you have it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word.

We’re going to start in verse 10. It says, For to us God revealed them through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?

Even so, the thoughts of God no one knows except the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God. Which things we also speak not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the spirit combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him. And he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one.

For who has known the mind of the Lord that he will instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And you may be seated. So Paul starts out by making the point here that the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, reveals God’s truth to those he indwells.

Those He lives inside. Who are the people He lives inside? Are they a super special class of highly spiritual people that have earned it over time?

The Apostle Paul teaches elsewhere that at the moment we trust Christ as our Savior, at the moment we’re born again, we are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, that He is there from that moment of conversion. It doesn’t mean that we are at that moment as spiritual as we’re ever going to be. We will continue to grow, but we have that Holy Spirit from day one, moment one, living in us, leading us, guiding us, teaching us, doing all these things.

And so if you belong to Jesus Christ, if you are someone who has acknowledged your sin and believe that Jesus died to be your Savior, He’s the only one who could, you believe that He paid for your sins in full and rose again to prove it, and you’ve asked God’s forgiveness on that basis, then you’ve been forgiven. And one of the many things that God has given you as part of that salvation is the Holy Spirit to indwell you and to teach you. And he does make a difference in us.

If you as a believer hear that voice encouraging you to do things that God’s word tells you to do and encouraging you not to do things that God’s word tells you not to do, you’re hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit. When you hear that voice telling you to do things that don’t make sense to the world and they line up with his word, you’re hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit. Now, we have to be very careful that we understand the Holy Spirit will not contradict what the Holy Spirit has revealed here.

I’ve had people sit in my office, not here, but at other churches, and tell me, well, you know, the Holy Spirit just showed me that it was okay to leave my wife for this younger woman. Someone has told me that. Bubba, that’s not the Holy Spirit, because He’s not going to tell you to do things that don’t line up with His Word.

If you think the Holy Spirit is telling you to kill your neighbor, that is not the Holy Spirit. That’s something else, and run far, far away from that voice, right? But things that don’t make sense to us in a natural frame of mind that line up with His Word, you’re hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit.

A man told me a story again recently about finding money with his co-worker, and the co-worker asking, can we split it? And him saying, no, we’re going to turn this money in, we know who it belongs to. That didn’t make sense to the man, to the co-worker.

But to the other man, the voice of the Holy Spirit was telling him what didn’t make sense from a human standpoint. I mean, we all wish we had more money. It’s human nature.

And yet the voice of the Holy Spirit was saying, no, you need to do the right thing here. So I want you to understand, if you belong to Jesus Christ, if you’ve been born again, you have that Holy Spirit living inside of you. And maybe you think, well, I don’t hear that voice as loud as I used to.

Well, if you ignore something and tune it out long enough, we’ll hear screaming and thuds and things in our house and my wife will say, how do you not hear that? Dads are able to tune out the noise of the five children, I guess, better than moms are able to. Better than moms are able to.

You know, if it gets to a certain noise, I hear it, but just the everyday stuff, I’ve tuned it out so long I don’t hear it anymore. So if you think, well, I’m not hearing the Holy Spirit like I used to, take what you do here and listen to that and do something about it and you’ll start getting more attuned to what he’s telling you. So we have the Holy Spirit, he indwells us, and the Holy Spirit reveals God’s truth to those he indwells.

It doesn’t mean that we all get that truth at the same rate, it doesn’t, as quickly as one another, but he’s teaching us what we need to know moment by moment if we’re paying attention. Verse 10 tells us, for to us, God revealed them through the Spirit. When he says them, he’s referring back to verse 9 where we left off last week that says that eye has not seen and ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man all that God has prepared for those who love him.

And I mentioned last Sunday night that for years I thought this was just one of those verses about, oh God has great plans for your life, everything’s going to be wonderful. Now in context what he’s talking about here is that the gospel is more wonderful and more meaningful and will bring more change and more growth to your life than you could ever have imagined. And so when he says these things are revealed to us through the Spirit in verse 10, he’s referring back to those truths that he talked about in verse 9.

And so there are a couple of things, there are about three things that he addresses here about how the Spirit reveals this truth to the people that he indwells, to you and me if we have the Holy Spirit living within us. We need to understand that the Spirit understands the full depth of God’s wisdom. It’s knows lots and lots of things.

It’s even better to have a teacher who understands all of it. I don’t know if any of the rest of you were ever that annoying kid in elementary school who always had questions, but I hated it when my teachers, you know, they’re teaching a lesson on science, and you ask a question about the topic, and they don’t have an answer. I thought my teachers knew everything about everything until I was in fifth grade, and they were talking about matter.

Anything that has mass and takes up space is matter. And I asked my science teacher, does that mean light is matter? She said, well, I’ll check on that.

I’m still waiting for that answer. I thought she knew everything. That was really disheartening to find out that these people teaching me didn’t know everything.

It’s going to be disheartening to you to find out that the guy teaching you doesn’t know everything. Sometimes my answer is, I don’t know. But we have a teacher who understands the full depths of God’s wisdom.

We have a teacher who gets all of it because it says in verses 10 and 11, the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. That doesn’t mean that he’s having to figure out what God knows. That means he’s down there and has an experiential knowledge.

However deep the depths of God’s knowledge are, the Holy Spirit is there and knows all of it. By the way, the Holy Spirit is the one who inspired the Scriptures. He knows everything there is to know about the Scriptures.

And Paul says, for who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the spirit of God. And so he reaches the full depths of God’s wisdom.

The one who is teaching us knows everything that we need to know about God’s wisdom. And that’s essential because on our own we can’t even know for sure what somebody else is thinking. There may be some times we can guess, but we don’t know for sure.

Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve driven my kids to school and thought my oldest was pouting in the truck because he’s just sitting like this the whole way, and I’m thinking, okay, did something happen before? And I’m going through all these scenarios, and I finally decided he’s upset about this. I know it for sure, and we’re going to talk when we get to school, only to turn a corner and everything’s fine.

He’s shading his eyes from the light, from the morning sun. I can’t even know for sure what’s in another human being’s mind. How am I on my own going to figure out the depths of God’s mind and God’s knowledge?

I can’t do it but the Holy Spirit can and so we have a teacher who understands the full depth of God’s wisdom and then he takes that wisdom and the spirit makes God’s truth freely available it says in verse 12 now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit who is from God so that we may know the things freely given to us by God God does not intend for for the the wisdom of his word God does not intend for the truth of the gospel and the application of the gospel and the implications of the gospel. God doesn’t intend for all this truth to remain hidden from us. We treat the will of God like it’s some mystery that we’ve got to strive really hard to find out.

Like we’ve almost got to twist God’s arm to find out what He wants us to do. No, God has a will and He reveals it to us through His Word by His Spirit because He wants us to know it and do it. And here it says that these things are freely given to us by God.

When there’s something we need to know he’s going to show it to us. When it comes to the truth of the gospel and how it changes our lives, that would have been important for them to understand because the Corinthians were steeped in a culture of mystery religions where you had to have secret initiations and you had to go through rites and rituals to try to understand what the gods were thinking.

And here Paul is saying the most important truths that God wants you to know, the most important truths that you need to know the Holy Spirit has ready access to those and he’s making them freely available as you need them we should rely on the spirit to to reveal to us what’s in God’s word that we need to understand but also know that this is not some competition that we’re in that that that God is God is trying to withhold as much from us as he possibly can get by with God wants you to know his truth and so he’s made it available to you and then he’s not just making the truth freely available but he’s teaching us how to apply it so we can grow in what we understand. Verse 13 says, the things we also speak not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

Now, when Paul says the things we speak in verse 13, he’s talking about those truths from verse 12 that are freely given, the things that God has put out there for us to learn and to understand. And he says the Holy Spirit goes a step beyond just making that truth available to us, he teaches us how to use it. I don’t know if you’ve ever bought anything used that you had to assemble, and because it’s used, it may not have come with the instructions.

You’re just given a big pile of pieces. Good luck. Put them together.

Sometimes I feel that way even with the instructions from Ikea. Good luck getting this together. We are not just left with a pile of truths, and God says you’re on your own to figure out how to use this.

The Holy Spirit, it says, teaches us combining spiritual things with spiritual things. The Holy Spirit of God enables us to fit the truths together in ways that they all begin to make sense, in ways that we can grow, in ways that we can apply these things. When questions come up, I did adult VBS this week too.

That was a lot of fun. I had a good group of adults and one five-week-old. And questions would come up that were not part of my lesson plan.

What does the Bible say about this? Well, directly the Bible doesn’t, I mean, the Bible doesn’t address this directly. Maybe that wasn’t an issue back then.

But if we take this principle that’s taught over here and this principle that’s taught over here, we can put them together and see how the Bible applies to this situation. I didn’t come up with that. That’s because the Holy Spirit is there not only making the truth available to us, but showing us how things fit together.

so that we can figure out how to apply God’s Word in a variety of circumstances. We can grow in it and we can live it. See, we have a responsibility to study God’s Word.

If you want to grow spiritually, you have a responsibility to study God’s Word on a regular basis and to apply it. But don’t assume it’s all up to you to make that happen. You study it.

You resolve that you’re going to do what it says, but the Holy Spirit is there to teach you what it says, what it means, And how these scriptural principles build on each other step by step to bring us to a place of spiritual maturity. So yes, absolutely take the responsibility of studying God’s Word, but lean on the Holy Spirit to teach you. And when we try to read and try to understand the Scriptures apart from the Holy Spirit, we’re never going to make sense of it in context.

Again, we may grasp a few things, but we’re never going to be able to make sense of it as something that we can live from and understand it the way God intended it to be understood. That’s why I’ve got, I’ve realized that that’s why for so many years when I’ve seen History Channel documentaries about the Bible, by the way, be very careful of those. they will have experts on the Bible with all their degrees and all their qualifications that I listen to them talk about what it means and how it fits together.

And I think, have you ever even seen a Bible? Are we reading the same book? Like, am I holding it upside down?

What is happening here? And then I realize, by their own admission, they are not believers. That doesn’t, please understand, that doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

In many ways, they’re probably smarter than I am. But the difference is we have a better teacher than they had, because this book will not make sense in context, apart from the Holy Spirit showing us how that works. And so the Spirit, Paul tells us, distinguishes two kinds of people.

Now, there are other kinds that are described in other categories of people that are described later in 1 Corinthians, but here in this passage, the Spirit distinguishes two different kinds of people. There’s, first of all, the natural man, what we would refer to as the non-believer, or maybe a friendlier term, the not-yet-believer, because it’s not saying that these people can never know anything. As a matter of fact, even if you’re a believer sitting in this room today, you were at one point in the first category.

There was a point in my life when I was not born again, when I did not have the Holy Spirit indwelling me. So this is not an attack on anybody. This is just saying this is where we are naturally, by our nature.

The natural man rejects Christ and refuses the Spirit’s insight. It doesn’t mean they will forever reject Christ. It doesn’t mean they can’t ever embrace Christ. But the natural man is the natural man because he is currently rejecting Christ. Verse 14 says, a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God. The teachings of Scripture sound like foolishness to him.

The gospel sounds like foolishness. For they are foolishness to him, it says, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised. I had not heard that word appraised used so much in Scripture.

Usually the word that I would use there is discerned. But appraisal is not a bad word either. If you’ve ever bought a house, you know you go through the appraisal process.

They go and find everything that’s right and wrong with that house and see what everything means, what everything’s worth. They do a thorough examination of the house. And Paul says when you’ve rejected Christ and don’t have the Holy Spirit and you’re not interested in listening to the Holy Spirit, the Bible sounds like foolishness.

The gospel sounds like foolishness because it only makes sense when the Holy Spirit does that appraisal and makes it available to you. But the Spirit also distinguishes that the spiritual man belongs to Christ and is empowered by the Spirit to think like Christ. Once we belong to Christ, we’ve been given a different mindset, and we should embrace that. Verses 15 and 16 say, But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one.

So we as believers are able to exercise biblical discernment. We’re able to read the scriptures and understand them in context and study how they fit together and how to apply them. And we’re able to take things that are taught and judge them according to the scriptures.

I hope you do that with what I teach you. I hope that when you’re listening to me preach or anybody else that you’ve also got the scriptures handy. And if you don’t have them handy, go home and look it up.

But make sure that what I’m telling you fits with what this book says. And use this book as your standard of making judgments whether what I say is true or not. He says the Holy Spirit gives us that ability to make those spiritual judgments or appraisals or discernment, yet he himself is appraised by no one.

The world can look at what we believe and what we think and how we live according to the scriptures and say it doesn’t make sense. And guess what? That doesn’t matter.

Because we know that it wouldn’t make sense. And if we’re led by the Spirit, we know that what we believe and what we teach and what we do isn’t going to make sense. But their judgment, the world’s judgment of us is not really a judgment of us.

It’s a judgment of what the Holy Spirit has led us to believe and to do. And Paul here quotes the Old Testament saying, Who has known the mind of the Lord that he will instruct him? He says, if we’re just being obedient to the leadership of the Spirit, who out there knows so much of God’s mind that he’s able to look at what the Holy Spirit tells us to do and judge that?

Who out there is going to instruct the Holy Spirit? Who’s going to teach the Holy Spirit anything? And of course, it’s a rhetorical question.

None of us approach the level of being able to instruct the Holy Spirit of God. And after all of this, he says, but we have the mind of Christ. That doesn’t make us better. It doesn’t make us more valuable than anybody else around us.

It simply means we’ve been given a different mindset. And so this idea that we as believers, we as people who belong to Jesus Christ, this idea that we can live however we want, or we can live however the world thinks we ought to live, or we can change our message to make other people comfortable, that we can do any of this, it’s completely foreign to a biblical understanding of how we’re supposed to navigate the world. He says we’ve been given the mind of Christ. Our entire way of thinking gets transformed.

Some of you out there, if you’re not believers, you may be thinking, well, that doesn’t sound like a good deal. That sounds like brainwashing. It’s not making us all think alike. I did not lose my individuality when I became a Christian.

My wife is also a believer. She and I think very differently. I mean, we have different thought processes, different personalities.

We didn’t lose any of that. And yet there’s still something that binds our thinking together that we have this mindset as believers that we’re going to, to the best of our ability, do what’s right and what God’s word says. Now, we fall short of that frequently.

But that’s just an example. Nobody in this room lost their individuality and became, I mean, this is not the Stepford Wives. It’s a really old movie.

We’re not talking about robots here, but a sense in which working within our individual personalities and everything, God has put something new in us that helps us to think the way we were created to. It changes our way of understanding the world and spiritual truth. And our understanding of God’s truth is entirely dependent here.

This new way of thinking that we have is entirely dependent on the presence of God’s Spirit in us. We do not have this ability apart from the Holy Spirit living within us. And the presence of the Holy Spirit within us is entirely dependent on our relationship with God’s Son.

If you want to have the Holy Spirit, you receive that Holy Spirit when you trust Jesus as your Savior, when you’re born again. When we come to that point of realizing that I mentioned earlier, that we’ve all sinned against God, that we have all violated His law, that we have all made choices that caused us to look at God and say, I’m going to worship something else. I’m going to worship myself.

I’m going to worship money. I’m going to worship pleasure. I’m going to worship whatever it is.

We have all disobeyed God in that way, and yet we understand that sin has a penalty, that sin separates us from God. And the only way for us to be forgiven, the only way for us to have a right relationship with God and hope and eternal life and all that comes with it is that Jesus Christ took responsibility for our sins and was nailed to the cross and shed his blood and died, taking all of our punishment so that we could be forgiven. And then he rose again from the dead three days later to prove it.

At that point that we acknowledge that and ask for God’s forgiveness, we not only have that forgiveness, but the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us and take up residence. And he begins to teach us from day one. And there is no shortcut to God’s truth.

If we want God’s truth, we have to come to it God’s way. If we want to understand him, if we want to walk with him, if we want to know him, the only way to do that is to come to him through Jesus Christ and then for the Holy Spirit to teach us, for the Holy Spirit to sustain that walk. And so if you’re here this morning and you’ve been feeling like God is distant, Or maybe you hear other people talk about their relationship with God or how they understand what He wants and how they understand what He intends for their lives.

And it’s all so foreign to you. You’re thinking, how do they know? How do they have a close walk with God?

How do they have this relationship? And yet I feel like God’s so distant. What’s wrong with me?

The thing that’s wrong with you is the same thing that’s wrong with me and wrong with every other person in this room. It’s called sin. And the only way to fix it is to trust Jesus as your one and only Savior and ask God’s forgiveness.

If you want to have that relationship with Him, if you want to know Him, if you want to understand His truth, you’ve got to come to Him through Jesus Christ.