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White Horse Media

Steve Wohlberg

Come, Holy Spirit!

Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus, we pray for the Holy Spirit.

Thank you that even though I had delays in my trip here, that I made it all the way from Chattanooga, Tennessee, into Portland, and now we're here together in Salem.

I pray that you will open doors, unlock hearts, that you will speak through me, to me, and to all of us.

And that this weekend will be beyond what we could ask or think.

And so we pray for that right now in Jesus' name.

So, the verse that I'd like to read is John chapter 16, verse 13.

I've shared this verse many times with many people.

In fact, somebody once decided to make a little plaque and he engraved a wooden plaque with this verse and gave it to me with a little stand.

And this verse on my little stand is now on my desk in Appleson, Tennessee, my office desk, so I can look at it and continue to think about it and how powerful it is.

And I'm going to tell you in a little while how God used this verse to completely change my life.

Verse 13, Jesus said, Jesus said, however, when he, the spirit of what?

And it's talking about the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth.

Somebody once said, you learn the most from the Bible verses that you know the best.

In other words, the more you know a verse, the more you read it, memorize it, think about it, look at it from different sides, the more you learn new things from that same verse.

And it's only just been within the last few weeks that it has really hit me in a different way that I, Steve Wahlberg, can have a relationship with the spirit of the truth.

And that to me has just become even more real to me just recently.

I mean, if you think about our world today, our world is a world where, you know, information overload, social media, email, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, the news, television, politics, you know, controversies that are going on.

There are so many different ideas that are bombarding us every day.

And the world is becoming a very, very confusing place for a lot of people.

You know, it's just hard to figure things out.

It's hard to tell these days, wouldn't you agree?

And in the midst of all of this, this verse tells us that we can have a relationship with the Spirit of Truth.

You know, we need the truth and there is a spirit who is the spirit of the truth.

And Jesus says that when he, the spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth.

And this verse is really, you know, it's an invitation to an experience.

Because there's not a 1 of us here or anywhere in this world that understands all truth.

And there's, I mean, how much is involved in learning all truth?

And that just tells me that we have a lot of learning to do.

There's a lot of things that Jesus wants to teach us.

And this is a journey, it's an exciting journey.

And yet, you know, we also have enemies, we have, there's devils, there's demons, there's evil angels, and they are always trying to get us off track and to teach us lies and deception and distortions and perversions and things that aren't right.

And so we're in a battle between truth and error, between right and wrong, between good and evil.

And that battle is not just going on around us, but it's going on inside of us.

It's going on inside of our heads and inside of our hearts.

I heard a preacher once say there are 3 battles that are going on right now.

1 of them is in the world, 1 of them is in the church, and the other 1 is in your heart, the human heart.

And then this preacher said, he who wins the war of the heart, or he who wins the battle of the heart, wins the war.

So this is the battle that we really need help with.

Now, before I explain to you, and I'm just going to kind of, I don't have a lot of hair these days, but I was going to say before I let my hair down and show you, tell you why this verse is important to me, I want to show you a number of other verses.

So let's look up a couple other Bible texts.

And this verse is talking about the danger of pride.

Somebody once said, pride is the only disease that makes everybody else sick, except the 1 who has it.

So, in 1 Timothy 3, verse 6, Paul is writing about the church and leaders in the church, and he's talking about how a new convert or someone that's brand new to Christianity should not be put into a position of leadership in the church.

And the reason is because they're not seasoned about the nature of the battle that we're in.

So he says in this verse that a person who is put into a position of an elder or a leader, he says, This person should not be a novice, or in the margin of my Bible it says a new convert.

He should not be a novice lest being lifted up with what?

With pride he fall into the condemnation of who?

Of the devil, right, because new converts don't generally understand the depth of the battle that we're in against Satan and our own human hearts.

And so a new convert, and I'm gonna share with you that this is what happened to me exactly.

Being lifted up with pride, he fall into the condemnation of the devil.

What was Lucifer's, what was his biggest problem?

Pride, Now I've got a statement here I want to read to you.

If you've ever read the book, Patriarchs and Prophets, there's a chapter, it's actually the first chapter about the origin of sin.

It says, Lucifer himself, this is way up in heaven, had not at first been acquainted with the real nature of his own feelings.

For a time he had feared to express the workings and the imaginings of his mind, yet he did not dismiss them.

So here's a mighty angel in heaven, a perfect angel, a bright, shiny angel who begins to have strange and mysterious thoughts about God, about his Creator, the imaginings of his mind, and he didn't understand at first where he was heading.

So Lucifer, part of his problem was he didn't understand his own experience.

And then it says, this is a very amazing sentence.

But such efforts as infinite love and wisdom only could devise, and this was what God was trying to do to save him.

He devised some kind of ways to convince Lucifer of his error.

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Come, Holy Spirit!

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