Ministering At The Altar

Some of you may wonder why a teaching on the anointing of the Holy Spirit is in a teaching series titled "Ministering at the Altar." It's here because we need the Lord's anointing to minister. If we try to minister from our human abilities, we will not be very effective. Very few of us have, innate within ourselves, the ability to heal the wounded heart. And none of us has the innate ability to heal physical bodies. So we don't minister out of our own ability; we minister with God's Spirit out of His anointing and empowerment.

This teaching may not fit those of you who come from a very fundamental background or from a very Pentecostal tradition, or those who come from a non-charismatic background. That's why I'm going to develop it slowly and carefully from Scripture during the next four lessons.

(Some of the verses I will use are in here many times. Forgive the repetition, but I need to share them with you.)

Jesus introduced the anointing as a gift when He told them to enter into a posture of prayer and wait for what He promised, an outpouring of the Spirit. In Acts 1:4-8, He gathered them together and commanded them to wait to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. He told them, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth." (NASV)

What Jesus said was, "Guys, wait. Wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit; wait for the anointing of the Holy Spirit."

There's a lot of confusion about this. What is the baptism of the Holy Spirit? What is the anointing of the Holy Spirit? What is the filling of the Holy Spirit? There are all of these terms floating around. We're going to bring some clarity to these terms and experiences so you'll know the real scoop. We'll do it with the Word of God.

I come from a non-charismatic, non-Pentecostal tradition, so I grew up reacting negatively to a lot of my Pentecostal brothers. There's a difference between Pentecostal and charismatic. I reacted to those hyper-Pentecostal people who seemed to live out in the back woods. You know, the guys we think ought to be handling snakes. God had to bring me to a place to begin to understand the things of the Spirit, and I also had some experiences with the Holy Spirit before I had my theology established. So, whenever I would have an experience, I would have to run to the Lord and His Word and ask, "Is this of You, or not of You?" I had to look at it in His Word.

Where did Jesus get His power? I was always told He had His power because He is God. He is the second Person of the Trinity. Therefore, since He is God, that's where He got His power. I was always told Jesus did all His miracles because He is God. That makes sense. It's easy to believe. The Bible affirms that He is God. John 1:14-18 says, "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testified about Him and cried out, saying, 'This was He of whom I said, He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.' For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him." (NASV)

Philippians 2:6-8 says, ". . . Who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (NASV).

God became flesh. Jesus did not do anything miraculous until He started His ministry and that was about the age of 30. Jesus never did operate out of His deity.

Acts 10:38 says, "You know Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him" (NKJV).

Why would Jesus need the Holy Spirit? He was God. Right? Going back to Philippians 2, verse 6 says, "He existed in the form of God." It talks about equality with God. Then why would He need the Holy Spirit? Why would He need the anointing of the Father if He is God? This is the question we are answering: Why would God give Jesus the Holy Spirit if Jesus is already God? Why does Jesus walk by the Spirit and not by His own deity?

The point we're making is this: God became flesh. Jesus chose to walk by the rules of humanity. He walked by the same rules He expects us to walk by. Really, it's the rules that we humans don't have any choice but to walk in. All of us have to walk by the rules of humanity. None of us can escape that one. But Jesus chose to walk by those rules, to model this for us.

What I want you to see first of all is that Jesus did everything by the anointing of the Spirit. Jesus, Who is God, operated through being anointed with the Father, with the Holy Spirit and with power. Nothing He did on this earth was out of being the second Person of the Trinity. Everything He did was out of the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

John 3:34 says that the Father gave the Spirit to the Son without measure. He gave Him fully and completely over to the Son, and gave Him power over everything. When did Jesus get this anointing of the Holy Spirit? We can get some clues from the story John tells at His baptism.

John 1:32-34 says, "And John bore witness saying, 'I have beheld the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven, and He remained upon Him. And I did not recognize Him, but He who sent me to baptize in water said to me, "He upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the one who baptizes in the Holy Spirit." And I have seen, and have borne witness that this is the Son of God' " (NASV).

Now this isn't an argument over getting baptized in water and then getting the Holy Spirit. That's not what this is an argument for. In fact, the only time we see that those things were concurrent is this time. Other times, people would receive the anointing of the Holy Spirit at a different time from their water baptism.

In the Old Testament, when the Holy Spirit came down and would fall on people, it was a temporary possession. He came upon kings, He came upon prophets, He came upon certain people for specific times. Many of them would carry that anointing for their entire life. It would be removed from some of them, as in the case of King Saul.

Here it says that the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus and remained on Him. This is a type of the anointing that God gives in the New Testament. Luke 3:22-23 says, ". . . and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came out of heaven, 'Thou art My beloved Son, in Thee I am well-pleased.' And when He began His ministry, Jesus Himself was about thirty years of age" (NASV).

Note that the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus at His baptism in verse 22, and then verse 23 begins with, "and when He began His ministry." Jesus didn't do any ministry at all until there was an anointing of the Holy Spirit. He did not hold crusades. He did not plan out His ministry. He did not do anything except work in the carpenter shop and prepare for what would happen one day.

A lot of us don't wait for the anointing. We just go. We go off like we have the power, whether we have the power or not. Jesus did nothing, absolutely nothing, until the power came upon Him. And those were the exact instructions He gave His disciples, rather than sending them off on their own.

The very next chapter, the first verse, we find extremely interesting. Here is God, come in the flesh, full of the Holy Spirit. Was He not full before? He was not. He was equal with God. He was the same man, but things are different now. Why was it important to record that He was full of the Holy Spirit, and then that He was led by the Spirit?

It was put there to show us that Jesus would now face the temptation of the devil by being led by the Spirit. He now had the power of the Spirit to overcome temptation. You see, the devil has no authority over God. What chance would the devil think he would have with Jesus? How could he possibly think he would have anything over Jesus? The only way is knowing that God was playing by the rules of humanity. Because Jesus was playing by the rules of humanity, the temptations were very real temptations. The Bible says He was tempted in every way just like we are. Those temptations were very real, very legitimate temptations.

Saying that the temptations that the devil used against Jesus were not real temptations is "gnosticism." The book of First John was written against that. Remember the test to know whether a spirit is God's Spirit or not? It tells us to test the spirits to see if they are from the Lord.

1 John 4:1-3 says, "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (NASV).

What is the big thing about Jesus Christ come in the flesh? In other words, if a spirit denies Jesus' humanity, that He was fully man with full temptation, that is not the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God affirms that He was fully God and fully man. The devil would have no chance against God. But he would have a chance against God who chose to walk by the rules of humanity. That is why he even bothered to try. It did not work. He attacked Jesus at a point of weakness, Jesus having fasted for 40 days. That makes you physically weak.

If Jesus could overcome the devil without relying upon His deity, what makes us think we can't also overcome the devil? Jesus laid it out for us. He did it because He was filled with the Holy Spirit. As we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we can face it also and we can go through it. Jesus would model the Spirit-filled life for us. What we see in the life of Jesus, we can see in our own life. The only exception that we find in the life of Jesus is the sacrifice, because none of us is qualified for that. You must be God to qualify for that, and obviously none of us qualifies. You must be perfect, and of course we have all blown it there. None of us is qualified to be a sacrificial atonement. Other than that, walking in the Spirit to the degree that Jesus walked in the Spirit is something we can and will do. In fact, Jesus told His disciples, "See the things that I'm doing? You will do that and more." In John 14:12, Jesus said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father" (NASV).

What does "greater works" mean to you? Think about that. You can do greater works than Jesus. That almost sounds like blasphemy, doesn't it? If it didn't come from the mouth of Jesus Himself, we would probably think it was. Jesus had a reason that He did not use His own supernatural power and relied solely on God's power - He was our role model, showing us that we can also be empowered through His indwelling Holy Spirit.

We will discuss this more in our next lesson, and see how Jesus intends for us to move in His power and anointing.