11/13/2026
Have you sought to receive the blessing of Pentecost and yet it has eluded you? Have you prayed, wept, and pleaded for the Holy Spirit to reveal himself to you through healing, discernment, tongues or other gifts... yet somehow you feel unfulfilled? Or, maybe, you have suddenly felt separated from the Spirit. When this happens it is not necessarily that you are unworthy, or no longer the child of God, but that the Lord has a lesson for you that can only come by a continued and determined seeking for Him.
“Then Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Matthew 16:24-25 ESV
I am a Spirit filled man, and yet there have been times when I have found it impossible to pray and exercise my gifts of the Spirit. I would pray fervently, and lift my hands to the Lord, and yet, the Holy Spirit seemed to be just beyond my reach. When experiencing this, I found myself searching and searching for the reason for my inability, and typically it would come down to a couple of causes, the first was that I was praying outside the will of God, and the second was that I had placed myself before Him in some way... I couldn’t reach the Holy Spirit because I was standing in my own way. I had placed a barrier of “self” between us. Perhaps I prayed for someone’s healing and felt a personal pride in it when God performed this miracle. Maybe I was doing God’s will in some other manner, and felt self-satisfaction in my efforts... I was not giving God the glory He deserved. Whatever the lesson... it was preventing me from experiencing that joy and relationship I desired with the Spirit.
The first of these can be remedied by asking our Father to reveal His will to us. This ultimately requires us to deny ourselves, and our own will, in the process. The second, however, can be much more subtle, and might remain hidden from us for quite some time. It involves finding in ourselves that place where our desires, our pride, and our inward “selves”, are standing between us, and the Holy Spirit. This is much more difficult because we probably haven’t been taught the lesson God has for us yet. In such situations we feel like we have come to a fork in the road of faith, and the Lord has taken one way while we are wandering down the other... we feel separated from the Spirit, and the desire to rejoin him is overwhelming. At their core, both of these shortcomings in us come down to one common theme... “self”. Listen to Pastor Andrew Murray as he writes about this situation.
“There are however, many who think they have come to the Lord with the source of their failure and have sincerely confessed it and put it away and yet the blessing does not come... there remains one great hindrance - the root from which all other hindrances come.
It is nothing other than self with its varied forms of self-seeking, self-pleasing, self-confidence, and self-satisfaction.” - Andrew Murray
We are taught by society at a very early age that it is good to have confidence in yourself. Young boys who play sports find that without it they can’t perform aggressively enough to succeed at them, or that to win in life they need a healthy dose of it, and young girls are taught that they need to exude it in self-image, social skills, or other challenges in their lives, for them to be successful. Yet when we approach God that self-same confidence that served us so well in the world, can interfere with our ability to place the Lord first in our lives. Allowing God to take full control over us means giving up the reins of our lives to Him entirely.
There is a well-known team building exercise that is conducted at retreats designed to bring workmates together. A person is asked to stand on a stool, cross their arms before them, close their eyes, and then let themselves fall backwards without trying to catch themselves. To do this they must first overcome their natural fear, but they must also trust that their coworkers will catch them... and that they will not fall to the floor.
In much the same way, God asks us to fall back into His arms during many of our spiritual exercises, and for us to do so we must overcome our nature... our “self”... and trust in Him completely. Interestingly enough, this is a spiritual lesson that we find ourselves being taught over and over again. The circumstances might be different, but at its core the lesson is the same. The Bible not only shows us this by example, but tells us directly; listen:
“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
Hebrews 5:12-14 ESV
Are we consuming mature Spiritual food (the Holy Spirit), and constantly practicing our faith through God’s instruction? The Spirit comes to us when we have overcome our “selves” and dropped our ingrained self-defenses. When we do this at last, we will not miss the blessing of the Spirit; we will find that we have received it during our walk of faith. In this way the Spirit becomes a reward, or a motivation, in overcoming our “selves”. Are you feeling the blessing of the Holy Spirit today? Maybe you are still seeking Him, or perhaps you feel separated from Him? Look into yourself in these situations, and find the wall that the Lord has led you to... then dismantle it.
Prayer:
Father, thank you for the gift and blessing of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Thank you for your Son Jesus Christ who told us that He must go so that your Spirit might come to us. Thank you for being with us always Merciful Father, and never abandoning us... even in the midst of the hardest lessons we are being taught. You are with us always Father, even during those times we feel as though you have distanced yourself from us. Help us to understand the lesson as you teach us about our relationship with you, and show us the wall that our sense of “self” has constructed. Give us a hammer Lord, and teach us how to dismantle these things about ourselves that make up the spiritual division between us. We want to forever be in your presence, Abba, and to feel your Holy Spirit within us always. Great are you who teaches us to be comfortable in your Spirit. Holy, Holy, Holy, are you who asks us to fall back into your arms, and never lets us fall to the ground. All glory is yours Father, and may the humility we show in yielding our “self” to you be complete and sufficient for this day, and forevermore.
“To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually pas he wills.”
1 Corinthians 12:7-11 ESV
“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”
2 Timothy 3:14-15 ESV
And let the Holy Spirit help us as we say… Amen, Amen, Amen.
Rich Forbes