Will the Holy Spirit ever leave a believer?

Did you ever think of the awful dishonor done not only to the Spirit of God, but to Christ by the denial of the perpetuity of this abiding? If the Spirit could leave, after having taken up His abode in us, it would involve a denial of the work of Christ. His work would have ceased to avail before God. It would drag Christ from His throne in glory, if the Spirit could depart from a believer.

Much has been said and written on this passage and on the question of the unpardonable sin. Many who had lived in open sin and worldly lusts, having been arrested by the grace of God, almost despaired for they feared they had committed that sin and now in spite of their repentance forgiveness was an impossibility for them. This wrong conclusion is often preached in so called "revival meetings" to bring sinners to accept Christ. Believers who fell in sin likewise have thought that after sinning with open eyes, wilfully, they had been guilty of the unpardonable sin. How many poor, ignorant souls have grieved for weeks and months thinking the Holy Spirit had now left them for good. But the Holy Spirit once given to the believer in believing on Christ has come as the abiding Comforter. He has come to stay and never, no never, to leave that which He has sealed. The Spirit may be grieved, He may be quenched, but never can He be driven away so that the true believer would fall back and be lost.

This widespread doctrine of falling from grace in the sense of the believer's possibility to be lost dishonors Christ and His work for us. But some one says: "Did not David pray: And take not the Holy Spirit from me?" Certainly he did, and it was in order for him to pray thus for the Holy Spirit might have left him, for He was not then in the earth with believers as the abiding comforter. The believer in the New Testament is never exhorted to pray to the Spirit to remain with him. He is to be filled with the Spirit and continually guard against grieving the Spirit or not to quench Him, but never to doubt His presence. All these wrong conceptions spring from a deplorable ignorance of the fundamentals of the blessed Gospel of the Grace of God.

The Apostle Paul tells us that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit upon believing (Eph. 1:13; 4:30), and no Scripture in the New Testament indicates that the Holy Spirit ever leaves a believer. We read in Ephesians 4:30 that He can be grieved: “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” This is a reference to the redemption of our bodies. Our souls have already been redeemed by the blood of Christ, but our bodies will be redeemed when we are raised or changed at the Rapture: “And not only they, but we also who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23).

Nevertheless, when we think of the power that is available for the fulfilment of our life's purpose under the hand of the Lord, we have to reckon with the terrible danger of grieving the Holy Spirit (Eph.4:30) so that we do not see His mighty works. The Holy Spirit is with us and will never leave us, He came to us the moment we believed, He is a seal, the mark of a transaction that God will never go back on, but we are exhorted not to grieve the Holy Spirit because it is so sadly true in Scripture, and in our experience, that by the manner of our lives we often do.

Needless to say that the Holy Spirit comes to a believer once and once only. He comes, as our Lord said when near the end of His life on this earth, “that He may ABIDE with YOU for ever” (John 14:16). This was in contrast to Old Testament times when the Spirit might come and go, as for instance when “the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul” (1 Sam. 16:14). With this agrees Ephesians 4:30, where it is said to the believers, “Ye are sealed unto the day of redemption,” that is until the glad day when our Lord shall raise His sleeping saints and change His living saints, when redemption shall even touch our bodies as it has our souls, and the flesh and mortality and corruption shall be left behind for ever.

We have the divine assurance that He will not leave us, that He dwells in us "forever," and "unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4:30) which means, not till we do something to grieve Him, but, till Christ comes to claim His purchased possession.

The Holy Spirit will never leave the heirs. We have a testimony that we shall not lose the Holy Spirit in Acts 1 where it says that through the Holy Spirit Christ gave commandments to His apostles, after His resurrection. He had not lost the Holy Spirit as a man by rising; and that brought me to a very blessed and happy thought, because now it is something like the steam in an engine, where half the force is lost in making the engine go, but when I get to heaven there will be no such difficulty to contend with.

Let me put a case that any believer may understand. The Holy Ghost dwells in you, if you are a Christian; but are you always acting in the Spirit I No. Does not the Spirit always abide? To be sure He does. You are always the temple of God; you never can be anything else, if you are members of Christ; but you may for all that sometimes grieve the Holy Spirit. Your obligation, however, never ceases. It is just so with the Spirit in the church.

Our present enjoyment of divine things depends upon the measure in which we keep from things and ways which would grieve the heavenly Seal, the Holy Spirit. He is sensitive to all that offends holiness, in conduct, speech, or disposition of heart as detailed from Eph. 4:20 and onwards. He will never withdraw Himself from the one sealed; that would be to falsify the whole truth of redemption. But He does, when grieved, withdraw joy and power from the Christian's life until the fault is confessed, and the frame of mind which allowed the old man to act again is judged. The reason that a Christian out of communion is inwardly wretched (even if he be outwardly placid) is not that the Spirit has abandoned him, but that He will not abandon him; necessarily depriving him of happiness until he has returned to his Lord in broken confession.

We are not to grieve Him, for we are sealed by Him unto the day of redemption (Eph. 4:30). He does not leave us when He is grieved, but we miss His gracious and blessed leading of our hearts and minds into the glorious sphere of heavenly relationships and affections which are ours in Christ. He has, when we grieve Him by the allowance of the flesh, to occupy us with our miserable selves, and our sad failure, in order that we may be led to self-judgment, confession, and restoration. But leave us He never shall, until we meet in the air the Christ to whom He is guiding us, when we shall never again grieve Him. The Psalmist has to ask that Jehovah may not take His Holy Spirit from him (Ps. 51:11), for he had the Spirit only as the Spirit of prophecy, but we have Him as the seal of the righteousness which is ours in Christ, and as the Spirit of sonship; and He is so linked up with the life which is ours in Christ that, whatever our ways may be, He is in us and with us for ever. And this is a great incentive to a holy walk, and is so presented in the Epistle to which I have referred above.