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Insight's to the Word with Pastor Teague!
April 14, 2010 John 20.26-28
Thomas was given an opportunity you and I will never have. He saw and physiologically experienced Jesus like none other. As far as we know – Thomas did what no one else ever did. He put his fingers into the actual scars that Jesus bore from Calvary. Jesus gave Thomas this opportunity because He knew that Thomas was struggling with belief. What a caring and loving Savior!
I wonder how many people have come face to face with an experience with the Holy Spirit only to walk away due to doubt and unbelief? Think about it for a moment. How many of you have never experienced the fullness of the Holy Spirit? How many of you have never experienced speaking in other tongues as the Holy Spirit enables you? How many of you have never experienced the operation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit as recorded in 1 Corinthians 12? And now I would ask,”Why?”
Are we modern day Thomas’s? Have we raised up a generation of people who second guess this awesome experience? To be honest…I think so! I want to challenge you. I want to challenge you to be open, honest and radical with your faith and your experience with the Holy Spirit. Every gift in the scripture is one of grace. God grace’s us with His gifts. Jesus Himself was a Gift of grace and mercy. The fullness of the Holy Spirit is a gift (Greek: dorea). The nine gifts of the Holy Spirit given to edify the church in 1 Corinthians are gifts (charisma). Somehow I want to challenge your faith to believe that receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit is as easy as receiving the gift of salvation. God didn’t give us these gifts to complicate our lives. He gave them to us to empower us for daily living. I urge you to push forward and ask the Lord to increase your desire to experience the fullness of the Spirit.
We are often inhibited by fear and doubt in the operation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. My focus for now is the gift of the fullness of the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost in the upper room. These one hundred and twenty plus believers entered the upper room nearly two thousand years ago not knowing what to expect – and received the Promise of the Spirit without hesitation. Wham! Bam! Slam! No questions asked! No committees appointed to see if this was the real deal! They received what the knew was the Promise and took it to the streets. Thousands were brought into the kingdom due to their diligence and their blind faith.
But wait a minute! Did they receive out of blind faith and ignorance put together? Is part of the problem that we “know too much” about the Holy Spirit? Have we allowed the nay-sayers, the frauds and the charlatans to rob us of a scriptural experience? Have we listened to everyone and everything but the Word? I say yes to these questions and more. I challenge you to take a huge erasure and clear your mind of all you have ever been told and all you have ever seen in relationship to the Holy Spirit that comes anywhere near that which would give seed to doubt and fear. Erase it. There you go. Now pick up a Bible and start reading the book of Acts. Read with a virgin mentality. Be diligent in your reading. Read Acts 2 over and over. Get the Word of God into your spirit man instead of the word of man. Man can only produce that which is imperfect. The Word is perfect. Read it and let it sink into your spirit.
Now believe you can receive. You don’t have to be in church, at an altar or have seventeen people laying hands on you. Go ahead. Believe the Promise of the Holy Spirit is a Gift for you personally. You don’t have to be a certain age. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be an experienced believer. Just believe it’s for you. Now relax and pray. Allow the Holy Spirit to fill you up like a glass of water. Allow His Spirit to fill you up to over flowing. That movement in your tongue is not by your initiative. It’s the Holy Spirit using your tongue to speak His language. It’s like you telling little Johnny, “Go tell your dad this or that!” You child would speak for you. He would repeat your words using his or her mouth. When you receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit that’s what is happening. The Holy Spirit is using your vocal chords to speak His language. His language of praise to the Father. He will glorify the Father through your voice.
Now then – I don’t understand all the “mechanics” of this awesome experience and gift. But what I do know is that since I was fifteen years old my life has been empowered by the Holy Spirit. My life has never been the same. My prayer life grows every day. Every time I speak in tongues I am reminded of the awesome fact that the Holy Spirit resides in me. He lives in me and therefore uses my vocal chords to speak His message. He uses my voice to pray and intercede for me. I’m humbled by this simple, indescribable and undeniable fact.
I challenge you to pray for the fullness of the Holy Spirit in your life. Thomas had to overcome doubt and fear by a personal experience with Jesus that he could tangibly sense with his own body. The Gift of the Holy Spirit works very similar to us. We can physically (speaking in tongues) sense the Lord in our life in a deeply personal way. Now then…what are you waiting for? Find an altar of prayer, make a place of prayer, take your Bible with you. Now relax and begin praying for the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Go for it. It’s the best real free Gift you will ever experience.
Pastortimteague's Blog 
Yes so many people have walked a way from their experience with Holy Spirit
because of doubt and unbielf. Satan has taught the world to believe nothing that the church has said or the Holy Spirit has.
The flesh man wants the manufestion right away. When Thomas did not
see Jesus the first time his flesh man started to doubt.
I think God placed this in Scripture to show us that we need to
believe when the flesh man say we are wrong or when the setution become hard
we need to cucify the flesh. Remember that the Holy Spirit is here to give us strenght when we are week.
John 20:29 say Blessed are those who have not seen and YET have believed.