Michael Koulianos emphasizes the divinity of the Holy Spirit, illustrating that He is not just a source of emotional experiences but is indeed God Himself. He references Isaiah 6 and Acts 28 to show that the Holy Spirit speaks with the authority of the Lord, and he warns of the seriousness of lying to the Holy Spirit, as seen in the story of Ananias and Sapphira. Koulianos explains that true liberty comes from the Holy Spirit, enabling believers to become more like Jesus through a relationship with Him. He encourages the congregation to recognize the holiness of God and to live lives that reflect His glory, emphasizing the importance of understanding the Holy Spirit's role in their lives. The sermon concludes with a prayer for a deeper fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

Last week we talked about the Holy Spirit. We're still in our series on the Holy Spirit. And last week we talked about God, the Holy Spirit. God, the Holy Spirit. I want you to take your Bibles to Isaiah chapter 6, verse 9. I started with the Holy Spirit being God because I feel like that is the right place to start. That sets the tone and the standard and the stage for our relationship with Him. Isaiah 6, actually let's begin with verse 8. Also I heard the voice of the Lord, I want you to underline Lord, saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Us is capitalized there, by the way. Then I said, Here am I, send me. And He said, who's speaking here? Say the Lord. Go and tell this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand. Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull, their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and return and be healed. I could preach on that verse alone for a month. Who is speaking there? Come on, come on, what do you feel? Is this a, what are we doing here? Come on, who is speaking here? The Lord. Alright, now I want you to go to Acts 28, 25, which is a repeat, a quotation of Isaiah 6. So we're going to read this carefully, and your brain is going to fry, and it's going to be fun to look into your eyes when it starts frying. Don't you love the Word of God? Acts 28, 25. So when they did not agree among themselves, they departed after Paul had said one word. Are you ready? The Holy Spirit spoke rightly through Isaiah the prophet to our fathers, saying, Go to this people and say, Hearing you will hear, and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive. This is a repeat, but who did Paul say was speaking in Isaiah 6? The Holy Spirit. What does Isaiah 6 call the person speaking? The Lord. There you go. The Holy Spirit is the Lord. He is much more than the one who gives you goose bumps and helps you get words of knowledge. That's fine. He will give you words of knowledge. We see it, I don't know, all the time. But you've got to know who you're dealing with. You've got to know who you're dealing with. Bob Gladstone of the Brownsville Revival said something really powerful once. He said, The manifest presence of the Holy Spirit is like nuclear power. When properly walked with and handled, it gives life, brings electricity and energy, but when it's twisted and not properly dealt with, it can kill you. And so is the person of the Spirit. It's vital we understand who we're walking with. Acts 5.3. Acts 5. Oh, no, no, no. I'm going to give you another one. 2 Corinthians 3.17. We're about to laugh and cry and rejoice in this passage. 2 Corinthians 3, verse 17, I should say. 2 Corinthians 3.17. If you're ready, say uh-huh. Now the Lord is the Spirit. Now the Lord is the Spirit. That's about as simple as it gets. And where the Spirit... This one, I'm about to laugh at you and with you. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. All you weird people love that one. But you just didn't read the next verse. But we all with an unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory. But how does that happen? Just as by the Spirit of the Lord. I'm joking with you when I call you weird, but I'm not. You know who you are. And you're still deeply loved. We've been telling the world that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. And we've been telling the world that that liberty is unto just going bonkers whenever you want to. It's just not what the Bible says. It's fun as it is to go bonkers. And sometimes you need to. I'd much rather have a church that's a little on the bonker side than this. Cool. Another guy got saved. Really cool. Cool. I'd much rather have some people who make you wonder than just a congregation filled with people who look like they've been embalmed. That's the worst. I will never pastor that kind of church. I'd rather deal with the grenade and the bomb, as I said before. We'll pastor the mess. Give me the fire. Give me everything that comes with it. And then we have to be humble enough to receive correction and we're all good. And we can have it all. Do you follow me? So here, the Bible says that the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. To do what? To become more like Jesus. By looking at Him. Not to just scream ho every eight seconds. That is not what this verse is talking about. Now, so I've had guttural groans. I get it. I've had it. I understand that. But that verse is not talking about us doing whatever we want. That verse is actually saying the Holy Spirit is God and where He is, He brings a liberty to the soul to behold the Lord so that you become more like the Lord. That's what that verse is about. Does that make sense? So we always go, we're going from glory to glory. Not if you don't look more like Jesus every time. Sometimes glory to glory is actually becoming more quick to forgive. You know what I mean? Sometimes going from glory to glory is being faithful with your resources and being a faithful steward, a faithful tither, and a faithful person who brings offerings. That is part of it. Because Jesus actually sat at the offering box and watched everyone give. That makes us really uncomfortable. He sat there. What if I had the boxes here and just went like this? And they didn't have envelopes to hide the offering, to make it more private. They didn't have that. So how do you think He knew she brought two mites? He saw them. He was really engaged in it. He wasn't so much looking at the number, He was looking at the heart. But He saw the correlation. Do you see? Sometimes that is going from glory to glory. The word glory, by the way, actually means the manifest person of the Lord Jesus. So going from glory to glory means this. I become more and more like Jesus. Not more and more cosmic. More and more like the Lord Jesus Christ. That is what it means to go from glory to glory. The glory of God is the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit that reveals Jesus. I become more like Jesus by beholding Him as in a mirror. In other words, if I stare at Him, He morphs me into His nature. We call that adoring, worshipping, meditating on the person of the Lord. It works like a mirror. And that is why the Holy Spirit comes here as the Lord to bring a liberty. What does that look like? Was anyone interested in being like Jesus and going from glory to glory before you got saved? I don't know about you. I wasn't. That was the last thing on my mind. I was not thinking about how to be more meek. How to be more humble like the Lord. How to forgive my enemy. I wasn't thinking like that. But all of a sudden I am born again. A liberty comes and I can see the Lord with the eyes of my heart. And with that vision, with that internal vision of constantly beholding, He makes me like Him. You do not become more like Jesus by merely trying to become more like Jesus. You become more like Jesus by staring at Jesus. Which is liberty. Liberty to look. Aren't you glad we took 15 extra minutes? Acts 5.3 But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land? Quick question. What did Peter also say? You have not lied to man, but to? Wild that Ananias was lying to Peter in the flesh. But because God was in the house, the Holy Spirit saw it as him lying to God. You see revival, a house of presence, is costly and in some ways dangerous. Because when the glory comes, the stakes go up, the standard is lifted. Why was there such a judgment? We know a lot of people who die. I'm sorry, who have lied. How many people lie in church? We've all been around it. Gosh. Some of the stuff going around today makes me scratch my head. The stuff certain Christian leaders do makes me scratch my head. As much as I love them, I'm going, what in the Lord's name are you thinking? You're supposed to be upping the ante and setting a higher standard and your example is damaging the body of Christ. Well, that's not new. But why did Ananias and Sapphira die, yet others who lie don't? I'll tell you. The glory of the Holy Spirit. See, when He comes, everything is accentuated. Why did Jesus say it'd be better that Judas would never be born? Judas the first guy to steal money or the last? No. What was it? He walked with Jesus. He walked with the glory in flesh. And because Jesus revealed Himself to Him in that measure, His correction, or I should say Judas' penalty was much more extreme because to whom much is given, much is required. That's the way it is. I'll go on and on. Moses. Poor Moses. Poor Moses gets his calling at 80. 80 years old. Has to lead a nation out of bondage through a wilderness at 80 years old. Serves his father-in-law from 40 to 80. Becomes a shepherd. He goes from prince, which is the highest, to shepherd, which was the lowliest occupation. Then God could trust him. Missed that. You want to be a prince in heaven, you have to become a shepherd here. That's another teaching. So Moses does his best and he gets frustrated with those people. You can't blame them because they want to kill him. Or him. You can't blame him. They want to kill him. And they want water and the Lord says, hey, strike that rock and he strikes the rock but he strikes it twice. And we all say, Moses did not get to go into the promised land because he hit the rock twice. True, yes, but there's more to it. Number one, the rock spoke of Christ and Jesus only died once. That's what Hebrews teaches us. So he struck it twice. That was the first thing that went wrong. Number two, the Lord told him what he really did wrong. See, we look at the action. God looks at the heart. And this was the big issue to God. This is what God said to Moses. You have not hallowed me. You have not made me look holy in this circumstance before the people. You treated me as common because we meet face to face. You forgot who you were talking to. Doesn't that happen all the time? Worldly, earthly relationships, we get close to people. They may be a pastor or a leader in your life and you start kicking it with them and all of a sudden you kind of forget that they're still your pastor. I've seen fathers check me really quickly. Hey, don't worry. One time I said something to my father-in-law. He was watching this meeting and I thought it was awesome, but he picked something up on the worship. He goes, that won't last long. I was so mad at him because I'm watching it there in my office getting blessed by it. People are getting saved and healed. He goes, something's up. That won't last long. I go, I said, why do you say that? It bothered me. He goes, the worship. The worship. I don't hear the Lord's name. Now I was young. I was a younger guy back then and I said, this is what I said to him, do you think that how great thou art is on repeat in heaven? Oh man. The moment I crossed that line he goes, I've been doing this for 35 years. You know nothing. His you know nothing was so true because you know the least when you think you know the most. In other words, I crossed over and forgot, yeah, he's my father-in-law. It's just his daddy. We're closest of friends. But God needed to remind me he's an anointed vessel of the Lord. Shut up. You see? And that's what happened with Moses is he didn't hallow the Lord in the eyes of the people. The greatest thing you can do for your family, for your ministry, is to live a, listen, a live a life of abandonment and holiness. It expresses to the people that God is holy. Okay? Now the Lord is that spirit. So Ananias and Sapphira don't do that, they die. Why? Because the spirit of God was manifesting in their midst. The standard was higher. Mmm, that's good. Romans 8 too. For the law, I'm going to speed up here because I have four minutes. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. Every born again Christian has that promise. You have been set free from the law of sin and death. Sin causes death. You no longer are part of that system. You belong to another system, a kingdom system called the law of the spirit of life. Is the Holy Spirit God? He's the spirit of life. He doesn't just make you come alive. He does that. But He keeps your body together. He puts the wind in your lungs to actually breathe and be alive. He's the very spirit of life. 1 Corinthians 2.10 For to us God revealed them through the spirit. Listen to this. For the spirit searches all things even the depths of God. What? The Holy Spirit searches, oh my gosh, the depths of the Trinity. Are you kidding me? And by the way, those are limitless depths. He searches them. And when we build friendship, He shares many of those things with us. That's what Jesus said He would do. He will take what is of mine and give it to you. Think about what we're being invited into in a life of fellowship with God, the Holy Spirit. Let me give you two more. 1 Corinthians 2.11 Next verse. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? So here Paul's saying your spirit really knows you. You know how like, have you ever been hurt by someone and you're doing all you can to forgive them? You're doing all the right stuff but there's something in your heart that you still know needs a little work. Everyone in you would think you don't need a little work. But your spirit's going, still a little work needed there. You still feel that way. Okay, that's what this is saying here. Let's read the next sentence. Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the spirit of God. The Holy Spirit knows the thoughts of the Trinity. That is why Proverbs calls the Holy Spirit wisdom. You can't get any wiser than the thoughts of the Trinity. You need the thoughts of God right now. Jesus said the Holy Spirit would tell us of things to come. We need to know that now. More than any time possibly in history do we need to know what the future holds for the kingdom of God. We know what the scriptures teach but God wants to speak to you in detailed form. Jesse dreams, I don't know, three or four nights a week. And they're usually substantial dreams of the Holy Spirit that we need as a family and as a ministry to move forward. I'm grateful that the Lord talks to us. Are you? Last one, last one. I've got so many I want to give you. Just one that will hurt in the best way. Ooh, here we go. 1 Thessalonians 4, 8. 1 Thessalonians 4, 8. So he, look at this, let me give you a moment just to get there. So he who rejects this is not rejecting man but the God who gives his Holy Spirit to you. That is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Let me read the prior verse here. Look at verse 7 in your Bibles. For God did not call us to uncleanness but in holiness. Therefore he who rejects this does not reject man but God who has also given us his Holy Spirit. Listen very carefully. Paul is telling the church don't live a dirty life. Don't live a compromising life. Don't bring shame to the name of Jesus. No mixture. Live a life of cleanness. He said don't live a life of uncleanness. Now look at verse 8. Therefore anyone who rejects this is rejecting God himself who gives his Holy Spirit to us. In other words the Holy Spirit is God who has been given to us. And Paul is saying here to resist his word is to resist him because his word has come to us by the Holy Spirit. Amen? Do you receive that this morning? Alright let's pray. Let's pray. I want to pray that the Holy Spirit would continue to become more real to you. That you would continue to walk in fellowship with him. Next week I'm going to teach on the love of the Holy Spirit. The love of the Spirit and what it really means to fellowship with him. Why don't we all stand please. Wonderful Lord thank you for all you do among us. Thank you for your beauty. Thank you for everything you've done here. I do pray that tonight would be charged with the glory of the Lord. Come on pray. I pray that tonight would be charged with the glory of the Lord. I pray that as we go home today that we would sense your presence and know your touch. I pray for everyone who's come today for a touch from you. That you would meet that need. That you would heal their bodies. Heal their minds. Heal their families. Heal their marriages. That you would touch them deeply. In Jesus name. Amen.