Matt Hagee - The Impartation of His Gift
The power of the Holy Spirit, is a promise for you when you become his child. The reason that this is important for you to understand is because so many times through our own traditions and our own backgrounds, we have come to decide who is qualified and disqualified for the Holy Spirit. Here's what qualifies you for the Holy Spirit. You believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father, end of story. If you have received Christ, you are a qualified candidate for the power of the Holy Spirit in your life, and you need him.
You say, "Well, how do you know I need him"? God would never offer you something you didn't need. When you read the Bible, Luke 11:13, it says, "If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more", say that with me. "How much more will you Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him"? In Acts 1, it says, "Wait for the promise of the father". And then in verse 8, it says, "And you shall receive power". Not only is the Holy Spirit a gift, but the Holy Spirit is a promise, and the Holy Spirit is the power of God in your life. People say, "Well, what does the Holy Spirit give me power to do"? One, he gives you power to accomplish God's priority, which is to be his witness. But then there are several other things.
Jesus said this of the Holy Spirit in John 16: he said, "When he, the spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth". Jesus spoke about the Holy Spirit as being the power in our lives: that we might be able to accomplish his purpose. John 14:26, he calls him, "The Helper". How many of you would agree that you need help? The good news is, is that Jesus Christ has provided you the best help that you could ever have. And it's not a watered-down version of who Jesus was. It is the Spirit of God in your life. What does he help you to do? According to John 15:26, he helps you to testify of him. He says, "The Holy Spirit will testify of me".
When the Holy Spirit shows up in the room, do you know what he's doing? He's testifying of Jesus. He's not here for himself. The only thing that he'll do is talk about the one who is seated at the right hand of God the Father, who is coming back full of power and full of glory. What is it that makes an audience filled with people, suddenly focus their attention into heavenly places in worship? It's when the Holy Spirit says, "Hey, what you're feeling right now, that's him. That's him". The spirit not only helps you testify. The spirit helps you in your weakness.
Romans 8:26, it says, "Likewise the spirit also helps us in our weakness". What weakness does he help us in? In Romans 8, specifically, it says that when you don't know what to pray, when you don't know what to say, when you're stuck in yourself, but you know you need heaven's help, you have an intercessor in the Holy Spirit that's inside of you. And he's talking to heaven, God the Father and Christ the Son, and he's saying, "This is what Matthew needs right now. He doesn't know how to say it. He's just down there groaning and crying and weeping. But I know what he needs. I'm walking with him. I see it. And if you can bring it to him, I'll make sure that he knows where the glory goes"!
The Holy Spirit is your Helper. Not only does he help you to testify and help you in understanding what God's doing in your life, but he helps you stand in the victory that Christ has given you. You, as a child of God, are fighting the good fight. This is what Paul said, "Fight the good fight of faith". Over and over we read these military analogies about the conflict that we have with the kingdom of darkness. But the thing about the fight that we have is we are not fighting for victory: we are fighting in victory. We're not trying to take ground. Christ has already conquered the ground and told us, "Just stand. Just stand in victory until I come back".
Now I'll connect this for you with several pieces of scripture, so you understand how complete and how total this victory is. Let's begin in the gospel of Matthew. Jesus asks his disciples, "Who do you say that I am"? Peter responds, "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God". Jesus tells him, "You're not speaking out of your flesh. You're speaking out of what heaven has showed you". And then he says, "Upon this rock". Now which rock is he speaking of? He's speaking of the profession of faith that Peter had. He's not saying Peter is the rock. He's saying the profession of faith that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that is the rock. Any church that has that profession is a part of the foundation. He said, "Upon this rock will I build my church". And then he makes this promise: "And the gates of hell will not prevail against it".
Now "Gates" speaks of a kingdom. And "Gates" speaks of authority. But the fact that Jesus Christ made it clear that those gates would not prevail against his kingdom means that he had total victory. And then he says to those who have this profession of faith, "What you bind, I'll bind. What you loose, I'll loose". If it wasn't good enough, he said, "And I'm going to give you the keys". So when he says he gave you the keys, he gave you the authority that he left with. And what he wants you to do is just stand in it. The problem is, is that a lot of people who go to church today act like born again teenagers. You want the benefit of being in the father's house. You want his provision. You want his protection. You want all that he has to offer. But you don't want to do what he asks you to do. This is why the church is losing ground instead of taking ground.
Ephesians 6, it says, "Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might". In the power of whose might? His might. He says, "Take a stand against the devil". And then in verse 13 of the same chapter, he says, "And having done all, to stand, put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand". Where do you see in this passage anything other than the statement and the command to stand? Don't retreat. Don't forfeit the ground. I have already given you the victory. You have the keys and the authority of the victory. Tell hell to back off: that belongs to the Kingdom of God. So why is it, if we have this triumph, if we have this victory, if we have this authority, so many of God's kids struggle in taking that stand? It's because we don't understand the power and the purpose of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Look at the disciples. They had lots of information. Three years with Jesus, trust me, they heard some good preaching. But for all of the information that they had, they had no power to impart it, because the Holy Spirit wasn't there. It wasn't until they received this power that they had the ability to impart what they knew. And by imparting what they knew, they began to change thousands of lives. Follow the path. Jesus in Acts 1 says, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you'll be witnesses unto me".
Acts 2, it says that the day of Pentecost had fully come. And then they went out into the streets of Jerusalem. And when they went out into the streets of Jerusalem, they began to testify of Jesus Christ. What does the Holy Spirit do? It speak of Jesus. It gave them the ability to do what they could not do on their own. They spoke in unknown languages. That wasn't a Holy Spirit tongue that they were speaking in. They were speaking in the known languages of the entire world. In Jerusalem, at the time, there was a feast. And at that feast were people from all sorts of different nations. There were Romans who spoke latin. There were hellenists who spoke Greek. There were people from asia and turkey and all parts of the earth who had traveled to Jerusalem. And here a group of Galilean fishermen, to put it in modern context, it would be like saying, "Here into the davos world forum of economic understanding where all of those geniuses go to tell us how we should live our lives to serve them better".
You know which one I'm talking about? If you want to know who were the least expected people to know how to speak in this many languages, you would have picked Galilean fishermen. Whatever language you were leading to hear, that's the language you heard it in. And all of them heard the same thing. "Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He gave his life. He rose from the dead. He's risen and he's seated at the right hand of God the Father". "Repent and be baptized". At the end of that service, 3,000 people got saved. Do you know why? Not because they understood it, but because it was imparted to them. And the power of the Holy Spirit is a contagious thing. It is unavoidably contagious. It's like the flu. Whether you want it or not, you're going to get it.
I have to take off my coat and go to work here. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Dad was up and ready. I spent nine years in children's ministry, so object lessons are always kind of part of the deal. Jesus said you would be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Now, we don't understand baptism in the context that Jesus shared it. Why? Because our definition of baptism is just a temporary immersion. And there's good reason for that. Because if you leave somebody under water for more than three minutes, they start to turn a little pale. But the word "Baptism" in the 1st century had a very different context. And the context wasn't about something that you did for spiritual purposes. It was something you did for fashion reasons. All material at one point in time is just white. There's cotton. There's wool, linen. And if the material was going to take on a color different than the natural shade that it came in, it had to be baptized in the dye that it was supposed to take on.
So if you had a crimson robe like Christ did that was considered very costly, very expensive, it had been baptized. The Greek word is "Baptizo," which means that the white linen, the white cotton, the white wool went into the dye and it stayed in the dye until it looked like the dye. What Jesus was saying to the disciples about this baptism of the Holy Spirit is that you are going to be immersed in the power and the presence of God. And it's going to stay on you, in you, and around you until you no longer act like you, you no longer talk like you, you no longer think like you, you start to act like, talk like, look like and think like the Spirit of God. This is what the Bible said when it said, "Put on the mind of Christ". It was saying, you're going to be immersed in the Holy Spirit until you walk away from everything you used to be and you become this new creature in Christ Jesus.
Now the problem with that is that most of us don't want to immerse our lives in the power of the Holy Spirit. Most of us want to come to church, and this 90-minute service right here is the only time we're going to spend any time talking about, thinking about, meditating on God's word and having a spiritual experience. As a matter of fact, if this thing goes 95 minutes, you will feel persecuted. And the rest of the week, you won't think about the word. You won't read it. You won't pray. You won't do what those who are immersed in the Holy Spirit do. You'll come to church. "Oh, that was good, preacher. That was good preaching. All three points, I wrote them down".
And then you're going to get out in the world. You're going to go to work on Monday. And the co-workers are going to pile up a bunch of dirt on you. You're going to get that e-mail from a relative you ain't heard from in months, and he's going to tell you how much he used to hate you but now he loves you, and pile up a bunch of dirt on you. You're going to watch CNN and FOX. Pile up a bunch of dirt on you. You're going to scroll Instagram, look on Facebook. And by Friday, Saturday, you're buried. You're buried in the filth of this world. And maybe Sunday rolls around, the alarm clock goes off, and you're like, "I don't even feel like getting up. But he said he'd never leave me nor forsake me". You do all you can to dust yourself off, and the choir starts singing a new song. And you don't know that song. And you're like, "Nah, I'm not getting in there".
Preacher starts preaching a topic that bothers you and offends you. "Nah, I'm not getting in there". And the problem is, is you're trying to operate in the world system and walk in God's power. That's not how this works. When you come to Christ and you are baptized in his spirit and baptized in his power, you stay immersed in it until over the process of time they don't know where he starts and you stop. You don't look like you used to look. You look like he wants you to look. You don't act like you used to act. You act like he wants you to act. You're now a part of his purpose, fulfilling his will, doing his priority. Your life is a vessel. The question is: "What's it full of"? The world? It don't mix with the water of the word.
The reason that many of you can't get people to come to church with you is because this is what you're offering them to drink, a little bit of the word and a little bit of the world. And it's just too muddy for them to trust. But when your life has been poured out and God's presence has been poured in, and this living water is something that satisfies your life, it won't be hard to persuade people to take it. Paul wrote to the church in Ephesians, "Be filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking to one another in Psalms, and in hymns... Giving thanks... In all things". How many of you know that's hard to do in your strength? Giving thanks in all things? And I don't know about you, but there's just some things I can't be thankful for. April 15th? Whew! That's hard.
Life will sooner or later knock whatever's in you, out of you. And when it knocks over a child of God that has nothing in them, guess what you pour out? Nothing. When it knocks over a saint that's full of the dirt from the world, guess what you pour out? The world. You ever been around a brother in Christ that had a bad day, and he used words you knew not of? That's because that's what's on the inside. But when the enemy comes after somebody who's full of the word and full of the presence of the Lord, and gives them trouble, and gives them trials, it starts to pour things out of them that other people start to see and feel. And they say, "You know what? I want to know how he did that". I'll take you to a place in scripture where you see this. And by God's grace, you'll understand who you are and who you need to be in it. Remember, the Word of God is a living stream. His spirit is always being poured out.
In Acts 16, it says that Paul and Silas, they were doing God's will. They were out ministering. And there was a disruption. A girl with a demon spirit came to them. And Paul did what Bible-believing Christians do, he cast the spirit out of her. Now the second that he did this, he was in trouble, because the individuals that were using the girl for their financial gain, they were using her to cast spells and tell fortunes, they lost their piggy bank because she was now set free. So they went and accused Paul of doing something that was against the law. And in order to keep law and order, Paul finds himself arrested. Now the thing that I think is so cool about this story, this is just pastor matt giving you a little tidbit here, is that Silas got arrested too. Everybody needs a friend that'll go to jail with them. Because trust me, most of you would have been like, "I don't know Paul. I just met him yesterday. We were traveling together. Take him".
But Silas and Paul spend the next several hours in the hands of a Roman jailer. And the Bible says that by the end of the day, they are beaten and they are chained to a wall in the innermost parts of a dungeon. I don't know what sermon Paul wanted to preach. But I promise you, everything that he and Silas had been through knocked the sermon out of them. And at this point, they're pretty empty. You say, "How do you know that"? I promise you, if you live long enough, you'll find out that the world can knock stuff out of you. You also know it, because when you read scripture, it says, "But at midnight".
Paul and Silas were doing what? They were singing and giving praise unto God. What do spirit-filled people do? They sing songs and hymns, and they're thankful for everything. Paul and Silas are encouraging one another with the worship that they're singing. And as they're worshiping, all of a sudden, heaven shows up in that prison. When you read the end of that story, what you find out is that soon as they began to worship and praise, an angel of the Lord came down into that prison where they were, and indeed, all that they needed, the hand of heaven provided. Because the Bible says that every door was ripped from its hinge, and every chain was broken from the wall, and every wall and every barrier began to fall. And every prisoner, not just Paul, not just Silas, but all of those who were also in the dungeon that night, every one of them were set free. Why? Because this is what the power of the Holy Spirit does in your life!
And you say, "How does that help me witness"? I'm so glad you asked. The Philippian jailer, who knew that if he lost one prisoner, he would have to pay with his own life. He runs in and he sees what's happened to the jail. There's no walls. There's no chains. There's no doors. Now I don't know about you, but if I'm going to jail and the wall disappears, I'm leaving. But all of these prisoners didn't go anywhere. Why? Because of the unavoidable influence of the power of the Holy Spirit. What they felt listening to Paul and Silas pour out their praise was better than any place on earth they could be.
And Paul tells this jailer: he says, "Don't harm yourself. We're all here," we're just having church. And the Philippian jailer says, "What do I need to do to be saved"? There is no reason why this church cannot see tens of thousands of people won to Christ if we will simply take what's in us and impart it to those who need to know who Jesus is. If we can simply take what he's put in us and pour it out, so that they will want to know that Jesus Christ is a redeemer: that they will want to know that Jesus Christ is the conqueror of death, hell and the grave: that they will want to know that we have the answer, and he is the King of kings and he is the Lord of lords, and Jesus is his name. Would you stand and give the Lord a handclap of praise in this house?
Heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank you because you are the name that is above every name. We thank you because your word is alive and it is powerful. We thank you because the Holy Spirit that is in us cannot be defeated, because it is full of the power of heaven above. Lord, I'm asking you, in Jesus' name, let the power of the spirit move in our lives, and let it set captives free. Let it break chains of bondage. Let it lift burdens of heaviness. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks and we give you praise, because we have victory in Jesus' name. We magnify you, Lord. We magnify you, father.