We always point to the Day of Pentecost as the moment when the disciples changed. But I do not think we completely realize what changed them. It was the fruit of the Holy Spirit being poured into them. Instead of the negative emotions that had defined their lives, now they were filled with love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, and all of God’s emotions that came into them. Lord, we pray for that to be our experience today.

Listen Now:

Download Transcript

Show Notes:

When we think of being filled with the Holy Spirit, we do not usually think of being filled with emotions or functioning by emotions. Yet when we have the fruit of the Spirit, we have emotions like love, joy, and peace. God is love, and love is a key emotion that we are to be filled with as believers. We do not want to be filled only with human love. We want to be filled up to the fullness of the love that comes from God.

That is why the Holy Spirit is such an important answer for our personal deliverance. We may be living in devastation because of emotions connected to a past event. We may have feelings, which are rooted in emotions that prevent us from having the peace that we need. How can we have the perfect love that casts out fear as the Scriptures promise? If we can be filled with the Holy Spirit, then we can be filled with God’s emotions to cast out the negative emotions that are restricting us.

As Christians we need to realize the significance of our emotions and accept the Holy Spirit’s role in the emotional realm. Emotions connected to painful experiences of the past keep us living in the past. We want to be able to apply the fruit of the Spirit—God’s emotions, God’s feelings, and God’s thinking about a past experience. If we love God and are called according to His purpose, then He can change our negative picture of the past into a positive picture of His purpose in our lives. Lord, help us to walk in this.

Key Verses:

• 1 Thessalonians 5:24. “Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass.”
• Galatians 5:22–23. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace ….”
• John 21:16. “‘Simon, … do you love Me?’ He said to Him, ‘Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.’”
• 1 John 4:16. “God is love.”
• 1 John 4:18. “Perfect love casts out fear.”
• Romans 8:28. “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God.”
• Revelation 7:17. “God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
• 2 Peter 1:3–4. “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness.”

Quotes:

• “Whatever it seems like is going on in your life, I just know there’s something bigger going on, which is God fulfilling His purposes in creating you.”
• “The most emotional experience of our existence would be to stand there on that Day of Pentecost experiencing that outpouring and the mighty rushing wind and all that it meant.”
• “I think that our deliverance begins when we are able to have the love cast out the fear, have these emotions of the Holy Spirit cast out the negative emotions.”

Takeaways:

1. It is more significant than we realize, and more significant than the way we have tried to function in the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is poured out into us to bring us emotions. That is what the fruit of the Spirit produces within us—emotions like love, joy, and peace.
2. The Christian Church began with Judaism in the Eastern world. As the Church became Westernized it lost not only its Jewish roots but also the meditative practices of the East. But we need to meditate on the Lord and appropriate what He has provided.
3. We need God’s emotions and His feelings to replace our negative feelings that are rooted in the past.
4. God lives in eternity and His perspective is born out of eternity. Therefore, He can turn anything into your good because He is seeing not just the end of your life as a human; He is seeing you through an eternal relationship with Himself.