 Let's just go ahead to write the first point. The Holy Spirit is the motivator for leaving Laban. When unnamed servant came into the house, Laban wanted to pull Rebecca to stay with him and the unnamed servant said, we got to go. Unnamed servant is the Holy Spirit. Laban is your flesh. The Holy Spirit comes to live inside of you, but you are also living with Laban. Laban is the one you grew up with. Laban is your uncle. Laban is like your father. Laban is your guardian. Laban is very close to you. You and Laban are one. And when the Holy Spirit comes to live inside of you and he begins to grace you with his presence, you will begin to feel, listen very carefully, a tug of war between the unnamed servant and Laban. Because they are different and you can't take Laban with you on the journey. You're going to have to learn to let go of Laban. The way we overcome our flesh is not by fighting our flesh. It's surrendering to the Holy Spirit. T.P. Joshua says that in the arena of liberty, it's not you suppressing your sinful desires but yielding to the Holy Spirit that gives you victory. As Christians, we're not in Buddhism. We're not in other isms in religions where you are fighting against your natural proclivities towards sin. We are not fighting our sin or fighting our flesh. Our number one goal is to clean to the unnamed servant. And as we do that, something begins to happen. We begin to detach ourselves from our Laban. When they asked, you know, Jill Moody asked his students once in the university and he put a glass, an empty glass of water and he says, could anybody tell me how to remove the air out of this glass? An empty glass. And everybody gave different ideas, you know, vacuum it out, breathe it out or push it out the air, you know, break the glass. And he says, none of these are good. He says, the only way to remove the air out of the glass is to fill it with water. The only way to overcome sinful tendencies inside of you and inside of me, the Bible says, walk in the Holy Ghost and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. Relationship with the Holy Spirit is the only antidote against repeated habits of sin. Discipline is good. You know, rules and requirements and all of these things, fast things are good. But only thing that can really change our sinful nature. It is the relationship and the intimacy you have with the Holy Spirit. Something happens when you become aware of the Holy Spirit. You change. You begin to change. You have a natural desire to be holy. When your goal is no longer to be holy, but to be close to the one who is holy, you become holier than ever before. As a Christian, your name, your number one goal has to be, I want to be closer to the Holy Spirit. As you become closer to the Holy Spirit, the side effect of that will always be holiness. Don't seek holiness. Seek the Holy Spirit. Holiness will become natural. Amen? Now, what I talk about right now is I'm talking about intimacy with the Holy Spirit. I'm not talking about just the relationship. Relationship is what God has given to us through his death with the Holy Spirit. He's with us always. I'm talking about intimacy is when you and him are close. When you and him are close, sir. When you become more aware, what intimacy does when you are intimate with the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit who lives in you becomes real. That's all. Intimacy is you become aware he's real. And when you become aware that changes your behavior. We live. We know he is here. We know he lives in us because of business, because of children, because of the pets, the insurance, the cars, the business, the hobbies and all of these normal things of life. It gets, you know, kind of, we become just distracted and it's fine. It's okay. But if you don't have moments, sometime in your month, at least once in two weeks or once a week, where you just get intimate, where you become aware of him and you go in just the routine Christian relationship with God without intimacy, you will see your life will be lived in the flesh. Because only intimacy throws you out of the flesh into the realm of holiness. Only intimacy causes your behavior to change, causes your sensitivity to things that are wrong, your sensitivity to things that are ungodly, to begin to be sharp and you begin to feel, man, this is not right. This is not right. Why? Because you've been intimate. When you're not intimate but you're only living by faith, means you're living in the routine, your senses become dull. And when they become dull, you will become a prey to the flesh. You know, when I was driving yesterday and my wife, you know, or some people that drive with me and if I drive fast, I don't drive really fast, but if I drive fast, I was showing my friends how my car can start really fast. And as I was just... And I was driving and they're like, hey, slow down, slow down. But, you know, it's first time in their car and you want to show off your car. You don't listen to that until the police officer drives. You become aware of the cop automatically. Holiness comes into the house, to the car. And I was driving and it happened yesterday on Friday and we got to my parents' house and it just hit me how moments of awareness change your behavior automatically. See, when you get into prayer and it's fine when prayer is a routine, but it's not fine if it's routine all the time. There has to be moments where you get in touch. Sometimes you have to linger a little bit longer in prayer. Sometimes you have to bring your own earphones and turn on the kind of music that you like so that it could stimulate the emotion. Sometimes you have to go to nature. Sometimes you have to pray at night and change your prayer schedule just so something in your spirit can change. Sometimes when you've ignored him for so long, you have to sincerely apologize and wait for the apology to be accepted. Now, you'll be forgiven like this by Jesus, but intimacy doesn't start just because you get forgiven. Every husband understands you can belittle your wife, make fun of your wife, do something bad with your wife and she'll forgive you in an instant, but you won't be imminent, intimate in an instant. She'll say, I forgive you and he says, let's be intimate. Jesus, hold off and you will feel exactly the same thing with Holy Spirit. You will come in and you sincerely apologize for maybe what you've done and you will say, Holy Spirit, I just want your presence and he will say, hold on. You hurt me. I forgave you. Please hold on. And then you will wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, because he's a person. We're not talking about salvation. We're talking about intimacy and as you wait, you begin to feel just these waves of the glory of God. They will come in. They begin to wash off everything and when you walk out of that, you're like a man who just saw a cop. You become aware. Holy Spirit was always there, but your awareness changed and when your awareness changed, your sensitivity became sharp and when your sensitivity became sharp, you said something unkind to your wife and you just, man, it didn't, you were not rude, but you were not kind and you were the way apologized and your spouse will notice you are different because you will always be holy to the level that your awareness of the Holy is in your life and that awareness comes from intimacy. Intimacy doesn't happen every day. Intimacy has to happen. We have to schedule it, seek it, do whatever it takes so that it happens at least on some consistent levels. What happens then is when the Holy Spirit quickens us, he develops the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is the character. It's we develop a new kind of behavior sets, whereas before we were angry, now we become more patient. Before we wanted to control people, it's interesting. One of the fruit of the Spirit is not controlling people. It's controlling yourself. You will always know that the Holy Spirit is active in your life. If you don't control your husband, but you control your emotions. You don't control your children, but you control your mouth. You can control yourself. You know the Holy Spirit is at work. If you're always running, controlling other people, you're operating in the flesh. The Holy Spirit is not even near leading your life at that point. Write down this thing about the fruit of the Spirit. It's fruit, not works. If you have to work at it, it's flesh. People who say, I work on my character, flesh. You never see Jesus calling his disciples to come and work under character. He always called them to follow him. He says, build intimacy. I'll change your character. Cultivate relationship with God. Your cussing issue, your anger issue, your controlling issue, your pessimism issue. He will begin to work on that. It's a fruit of the Spirit, not work. If you have to work at it now, I do understand it's yielding to the Holy Spirit. The Bible says to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. To work out those things God has worked in. But what we're talking about right now is to allow the cultivated relationship. And he begins to work on you by bringing those areas into service. The second thing is, all of the fruit of the Spirit. Now, it's interesting that it says it's a fruit. And it mentions nine characteristics. Now, I'm not like the best in English. But if it mentions nine characteristics, it should say fruits. Which I heard a lot of Christians say, it's the fruits of the Spirit. It never says fruits of the Spirit. It says fruit of the Spirit. That means all of those nine characteristics, the Holy Spirit develops at the same time. See, you can develop one of them at the expense of the other on your own. It's called work of the flesh. When the Holy Spirit develops them, he doesn't develop self-control without kindness. You don't become so meek and then you become so weak. He develops all of that at the same time. You and I cannot do that. Only the Holy Spirit can do it. That's why it's called fruit, not fruits. And it's interesting, all the nine characteristics of the fruit of the Holy Spirit are not actions. If you check the work of the flesh before that, you see that all of the works of the flesh are actions. Murder, adultery, it's all actions. The fruit of the Spirit is all about attitude. Holy Spirit is far more concerned on how you say things, how then what? Attitude. It's one of those things you can't point out in people. It's like when somebody released gas in the room. You can't point a finger. You know it smells. You know what they did it, but you have no evidence. The only thing you do is you go like this. When somebody has an attitude, it's exactly the same. When somebody has an attitude, you come to me, it's like, you know, your attitude stinks. Isn't that what you say? They're like, what are you saying? Everything is fine. That's an attitude problem. Holy Spirit will always work on your attitude more than your actions. Another thing about the fruit of the Spirit is it feeds others. Bring me my apple. You see the difference between an apple and an apple. One you wear, the other one you eat. This is the gifts. This is the fruit. When you allow the Holy Spirit to work on you because you're intimate with him, remember this, people around you will be fed by you. Your spouse will say, my husband is awesome. Your kids will say, I have the best dad. The church will say, we're so blessed to have this person. Remember this, when your character is influenced by the Holy Spirit, with gifts you will impact. With fruit you'll feed. If you have a horrible character, your children, your closest people will starve to death because of you. But with the Holy Spirit you'll feed others. Can somebody say amen? Stop. I forgot, I'm preaching, sorry. And last thing about the fruit of the Spirit is it grows. Apple. Apple watch doesn't grow. It only gets worse. The fruit grows. Each fruit starts first sour and then becomes sweet. I encourage everyone to watch Evan Almighty movie. In that movie there's this phrase where God, who was Morgan Freeman, he said this in a restaurant. He said, let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, do you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give them courage or he that gives them opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm feelings? Or does he give them the opportunity to love each other? How does it grow? Let me tell you how it grows. If God wants to grow a fruit of patience, he'll put you in traffic. He'll give you a spouse who says, honey, two more minutes, and she takes 20 minutes. He'll give you children who won't sleep at night. If God really wants to work on getting the anger out, he creates opportunities where you will be tempted to even do bad or follow the Holy Spirit. You won't grow. Don't think the fruit will grow like this. He came to prayer. Father, intimacy. Yes. And God just, he only can do that with gifts, with fruit. He cannot impart them. He can only develop them. Come on, amen. I can finish the message some other time, but right now I want you to rise to your feet.