Grieving the Holy Spirit

Well, how can we grieve the Holy Spirit of God? There is one obvious way—we are not going to be focussing on that—but I need to mention it, because it is so important: we grieve him by our sin. He is the Holy Spirit, isn’t he? That is the one adjective that is attached to him. He is a whole lot of other things: he is powerful, he is everything that God is—he is fully God—but the one aspect that is emphasised is his holiness, his absolute antipathy to sin, his purity. He is infinitely set against sin in all its forms.

So, we are not surprised when we look at the context of that command, do not grieve the Holy Spirit, to find what Paul is saying: Put off your old self. Put away falsehood. Let the thief no longer steal. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, with all malice, sexual immorality and impurity and covetousness must not even be named among you. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit. Paul is saying this is how you grieve him. This is what grieves him: things that are unholy. So, what happens then? He does not leave us. He never leaves us. If you are a Christian, the Spirit will never leave you. Jesus himself promised that: I will never leave you; I will never forsake you.

But Paul does say, he is grieved, or in another passage, he says that he is quenched. It is like a fire in the days we used to keep the fire on all night. The last thing you do before you go to bed is to get a couple of big shovels full of wet slack (coal dust) and you would put them over the fire. It was wonderful; the fire was still alive when you woke up in the morning. You could come downstairs, open the draught, and give it a poke—the fire was still there. But as far as you could see there was no flame, no warmth, no benefit from it. You could not sit and read by the light of the fire. You could not warm your hands at the fire. It was there, but it was quenched.

You could almost say that when we quench the Holy Spirit, it is like getting shovels full of the wet dirty slack of our sin, and putting it on the Spirit. He is there, but in a sense, he might as well not be there. You do not see his light. You do not feel his warmth. Your sin has quenched him. And he withdraws. He is grieved. He is hurt. He goes in to himself. He leaves us to ourselves. And we are defeated, discouraged, and we become stressed and anxious. Our joy goes, our peace goes, our enthusiasm for the Christian life goes, and we are in a most miserable state. There is hardly anything more unhappy than a true believer who has grieved the Holy Spirit. They are neither one thing, nor the other. They cannot enjoy the world because God has taken them out of world. But they cannot enjoy the things of God either. They are going through the motions. They are reading their Bibles, but they are not getting anything out of it. They are praying, but it is hard to pray. They come to worship, but the whole thing is tedium and boredom to them; they can hardly wait to get away—there is nothing in it.

I have to ask you, my dear readers, are you grieving the Holy Spirit in any way? Are you quenching him by your sin? I am convinced that this is at the root of many spiritual and personal problems. Nowadays, people are going around looking for an experience of the Spirit: they want another baptism; they want something to happen to them. But the problem is simple: stop grieving and quenching him. Then he will blaze up again, and you will feel his warmth. You do not need another experience, except repentance and obedience.¹

Edward Donnelly