LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)–Many people’s faith becomes a burden because they don’t understand the ministry and power of the Holy Spirit, said Adrian Rogers at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., Oct. 12.
“I’d rather die than be sentenced to minister without the conscious filling and anointing of the Holy Ghost of God,” said Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in suburban Memphis, Tenn.
Rogers spoke to a near-capacity crowd during the initial chapel service of the Southern Seminary’s inaugural Heritage Week.
Preaching from Ephesians 5, Rogers compared Christians who don’t understand the ministry and power of the Holy Spirit to a man who buys a new car and then pushes it everywhere he goes because he doesn’t understand that it has an engine.
“While on the one hand, they say, ‘I’m grateful that I have it,’ on the other hand they are just in drudgery, grinding out the Christian life,” he explained.
Citing Ephesians 5:18, Rogers said Christians are commanded to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
“It’s a greater sin not to do what you ought to do than to do what you ought not to do,” Rogers said. “It would be a greater sin for me to come to this platform today not filled with the Spirit than to come drunk.
“If you’re doing what you ought to be doing, you can’t be doing what you ought not to be doing,” he continued. “If you are not now consciously filled with the Spirit of God, you’re living in sin.”
The Holy Spirit’s presence is essential for several areas of life, Rogers said, such as worship, marriage and evangelism.
Regarding worship, the Bellevue pastor asked how many people had ever sat through a boring worship service.
“You’ve never been in a boring worship service. You’ve been in a boring church service, but worship is not boring,” he argued. “There’s nothing sadder than a full church of empty people trying to overflow.”
Concerning marriage, Rogers told the Southern Seminary community that Christians need the Holy Spirit’s power to fulfill their responsibilities — wives submitting to their husbands and husbands loving their wives.
“Everybody knows that a woman is infinitely superior to a man, at being a woman,” Rogers said. “And a man is infinitely superior to a woman, at being a man.”
The biblical picture of a marriage, Rogers said, is one with the husband as the head. “Anything with no head is dead and anything with two heads is a freak,” he said.
But the only way a woman can submit to her husband in this day of “radical feminism” is by the Holy Spirit of God, he explained. Likewise, men need the Holy Spirit’s help to love their wives as Christ loved the church — sacrificially and steadfastly.
“Most women will have no difficulty submitting to a man who loves her enough to die for her and shows it by the way he lives for her,” he said.
As for evangelism, Rogers said the Holy Spirit is the one who draws people to Christ.
“I am dependent upon the Holy Spirit of God to convict the congregation that I preach to,” he said. “Anything that I can talk you in to, someone else can talk you out of. What [the Holy Spirit] gives you is yours to keep.”
Rogers also spoke of the value of “redeeming the time,” as all the witnessing Christians will do will be here on earth. He said that it will be too late to win souls in heaven.
“There has never been a greater day, a greater age to preach the glorious gospel of our Lord and Savior than this day and this age,” he said.
Rogers said the Spirit must have “complete control” over the believer’s life, that the control must be continuous and that there must be a “conscious claiming” of the power of the Spirit by the believer.
“It’s not your duty to persuade God to fill you with the Spirit. Permit him to do so,” Rogers said.
