Tony Evans - The Promise

et me set a scene for you. This is hypothetical, so give me a little theatrical license here.

You have just been to the store and seen the most incredible refrigerator you can imagine. The thing is huge. It not only has all the bells and whistles you expect, it has some youve never seen before. This refrigerator will do everything but turn the lights off, put the dog out, and lock up at night. It costs thousands more than a normal refrigerator, but you buy it anyway because it is unbelievable.

The store delivers your new refrigerator to your home. In your excitement, you shop for all the goodies you want to store in it. You stock everything you can think of, then retire for the evening.

The next morning you run into the kitchen excitedly, only to discover that the milk is spoiled, the ice cream is running out the bottom of the freezer compartment, and the vegetables are changing color. Your new refrigerator is not working.

You call the store to give the people there a piece of your Christian mind. The man says, I dont understand it. Open the door and see if the light comes on. You open the door. No light.

Put your ear up close to the refrigerator and tell me if you can hear the hum of the motor. You do, and theres no hum.

He then says, Theres a cord at the back of your refrigerator. Please check to see whether it has been plugged in. Lo and behold, you go to the back of your new refrigerator and there it is. The cord has not been plugged in.

You come back to the telephone and say, Youre right. The cord was not plugged in. But for the kind of money I paid for this refrigerator, that shouldnt matter. This thing should work anyway.

I told you this was pretend, so stay with me. If you were to say this, at this point you would probably receive a brief lesson in how appliances work.

The man would proceed to say to you, No, no, you dont understand. Appliances are dependent in nature. Although your refrigerator has all the parts and Freon necessary to cool all the food you put in it, it was manufactured in such a way that it will not operate without an invisible power source called electricity. Unless you plug in that cord, your food will continue to spoil.

Now thats a long way around to state an obvious truth. No matter how much you paid for it, your refrigerator wont work the way it was designed to work unless it is plugged in to electric power. Neither will your spiritual life work unless it is plugged in to Holy Ghost power.

When God saved us, He gave us all the component parts necessary for spiritual life and victory. But we are dependent creatures. We have not been designed to work on our own. Only as we are empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit will we produce what our lives are supposed to produce. If you dont rely on that power, dont be surprised if the milk of your life turns sour and the ice cream begins to melt.

God never intended us to live the Christian life on our own. The Holy Spirit is His supernatural gift to make the new being we have become alive and real. In the pages that follow I will seek to demonstrate from Scripture and illustrate from real life the importance of the Person and work of the Holy Spirit.

Our study will seek to avoid the extreme of many in the fundamentalist community who allow the doctrine of the Holy Spirit to be a smokescreen which keeps them from experiencing His reality, resulting in a dead orthodoxy and truth without experience. On the other hand, we want to avoid the extreme of many in the charismatic community who seek an experience at the expense of doctrine, which results in an empty, emotional fanaticism.

It is my contention that this wonderful yet mysterious member of the Trinity is not some esoteric Being or irrelevant theological truth unrelated to time, space, and our day-to-day realities. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit is the heart and soul of the Christian faith and the victorious Christian life, and if we dont get plugged in to Him we will continue to experience defeat after defeat. The Holy Spirit is necessary to make sure that our knowledge about God is trans formed into an experience with God. He is a Person who performs, and He represents a doctrine that delivers.

Once plugged in we will experience the supernatural wonder of a life in which the Freon of Gods grace flows through the conduits of our new nature, keeping our spiritual lives at a temperature that, like an expensive refrigerator, protects us from spoil and ruin and keeps us fresh for God and nourishing to others.

PART

THE
HOLY
SPIRITS
PRESENCE

EXPERIENCING THE SPIRITS PROMISE

he Holy Spirit is not merely a nice addendum to the Christian faith. He is at the heart and core of it. He is not merely a force or an influence. He is the third Person of the Trinity, God Himself.

If there is anything you and I must understand if we are going to live what is commonly called the victorious Christian life, it is the Person and ministry of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, my task in this book is to try to address in as biblical and practical a way as possible the issues surrounding this most important Person.