Intimacy With The Holy Spirit by Pastor Philip Olubakin: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Exodus 3:7-8 records God telling Moses, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people... and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them." Every situation a person carries quietly, every cry that seems to go unanswered, is already seen and already heard. The taskmasters assigned to hold a family or a nation back are never greater than the God who says, "I am come down."

That kind of seeing is not abstract. One woman who had lived for over six years with multiple cysts and fibroids was called forward during a service, without any prior knowledge of her condition, on a simple prompting that God wanted to address someone in that specific way. She later returned from further medical tests to report every cyst gone. A man who had been partially blind in one eye had written, unseen by anyone, in his own notebook, a hope that if hands were laid on him during that service, he would be healed. He was healed that day. In both cases, nothing was known in advance; the point was never the specific method, but that God sees what is not being said out loud.

Who the Holy Spirit Is

Genesis 1:1-3 says the earth was without form and void, darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters before God said, "Let there be light." The Holy Spirit was present from the very first page of Scripture, long before any one tradition claimed him; he is not the property of a particular denomination or movement, Pentecostal or otherwise. It is worth noticing that nothing was wrong with the heavens in that account, only the earth was formless and dark, and it was there, specifically, that the Spirit moved.

The Holy Spirit is not simply a wind or an atmosphere; he is a person, with the same attributes as God himself, because he is God.

He is omnipresent. The psalmist asks in Psalm 139, "Where shall I go from thy spirit?" The Spirit is not confined to one place, and in that sense he is present across time as well, meaning what is broken in a person's past and what unfolds in their present are both within his reach at once.

He is omniscient. 1 Corinthians 2:10-11 says the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, so nothing about a person's situation, however hidden, is unknown to him.

He is omnipotent. One woman, praying for both a job and a child after years of waiting, received an unsolicited offer for an international role within a month of specific prayer, and by the same week discovered she was expecting. Nothing about a person's need, whether provision or fruitfulness, is outside what the Spirit is able to move on.

He has a mind. Romans 8:27 speaks of "the mind of the Spirit," because he makes intercession for believers with understanding, not merely with force.

He has a will. 1 Corinthians 12:11 says he distributes gifts "as he will," which means his engagement with a person's life is deliberate, not random.

He has a voice. Psalm 29 describes the voice of the Lord as full of majesty, powerful enough to shake the wilderness and strip forests bare. That same Spirit spoke plainly in Acts 13:2: "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them." A Spirit who once spoke light into formless darkness still speaks with direction into whatever feels shapeless or stuck today.