 Do you think that the Holy Spirit has left you? Do you imagine that your last mistake finally exhausted his patience and that he's now abandoned you, rejected you? Do you feel like God? Do you feel like the Holy Spirit is a million miles away? Well, if you're asking the question, has the Holy Spirit left me? If you feel that feeling that the Holy Spirit has left you, then I want to make this clear. You are operating on feelings, not on faith. So the first point I want to establish here using Scripture is the fact that the Holy Spirit does not abandon the believer. He does not leave you to your own demise. He does not reject you because of some mistake that you made. The Holy Spirit faithfully abides. And then I want to show you why you might be feeling like the Holy Spirit has distanced himself from you. I want to get into the Scripture and even somewhat into your feelings and thoughts to show you how that deception forms to where you begin now feeling and questioning and wondering, has the Holy Spirit abandoned me? But here's what I want you to do. I want you in the comment section right now to write a statement of faith, even if you don't feel like it right at this moment, even if this is difficult for you to believe. I want you to publicly declare, write it in the comment section, this simple phrase, He's still with me. Write it in the comment section right now. He's still with me. Again, you may not feel that right now. You may have trouble believing that. But I promise you, if you are a born-again believer, the Holy Spirit has not abandoned you. So again, we're going to look at what the Scripture says about the Holy Spirit abiding with you. And then I want to get into some of the minutia as to why you might be feeling that the Holy Spirit has abandoned you. First, go with me to Romans chapter 8 verse 9. But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. And remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them do not belong to Him at all. It's important to remember that the presence of the Holy Spirit fills your being at the very moment of salvation. Salvation is a miracle. Salvation is a work of the Holy Spirit. It's a mystery of the Spirit. How are we born again of the Spirit? No man really understands that completely, but we do know that it's a miracle of God. And when you are born again of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit must be present for that regeneration, for that new life to begin to flow. So if you're a born-again believer, you have to have the Holy Spirit. Now let me balance this by saying that I am not in any way implying or suggesting that you can go on sinning without any consequence whatsoever. No, your sin does have consequences. We're going to read Ephesians 4.30 in a moment where we'll see that one of those consequences is grieving the Holy Spirit. You will still reap from the sins that you commit, especially in the natural world. There are consequences to the choices that we make. Of course, yes, sin has consequences, even to some extent in the eternal realm. After you've left this world, after you've stood before God, there may be loss of heavenly reward because of the way that we live. But does the Holy Spirit abandon the true believer? No. Does the true believer desire to be holy? Yes. So again, I'm not suggesting that you can just go on sinning. No one is really suggesting that when they say that the Holy Spirit doesn't leave you. In fact, that desire to live holy is in part evidence that the Holy Spirit still abides with you. So here we see, though, that salvation or the identity of the believer is tied together with the presence of the Holy Spirit. You cannot separate the two. You cannot separate the two. You, as a born-again believer, have the Holy Spirit. And if you have the Holy Spirit, you're a born-again believer. Both of those realities are always true simultaneously. And that's very clear in Romans chapter 8 verse 9. Now, John chapter 14 verses 15 through 18 says it more directly. Watch this now. This is Jesus speaking. If you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another advocate who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive Him because it isn't looking for Him and doesn't recognize Him. But you know Him because He lives with you now and later will be in you. No, I will not abandon you as orphans. I will come to you. Now, of course, there is this prerequisite where Jesus says, if you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another advocate. Well, how do we fulfill the commandments? How do we receive righteousness? Well, the Scripture says that Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Ephesians chapter 2 verses 8 and 9 make it clear that by putting our faith in Christ, we receive salvation. By putting our faith in Christ, we receive that righteousness. So it is by putting my faith in Christ that I vicariously fulfill the commands to the life of Christ. So the Holy Spirit then comes to abide. And once He comes to abide, Jesus says, He will never leave you. He abides faithfully. Now, you may imagine that your last mistake was the one to finally do you in. You may imagine that your last fault, your last whatever you want to call it, lapse in judgment. You may be saying, oh, man, I've really messed up this time. But what would it make sense? How would it make sense for God to remove from you your only power to be holy as a punishment for not living holy? That would make no sense whatsoever. So we understand that if we have this desire for holiness that the Holy Spirit abides. Now, Ephesians 4.30 says this, And do not bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit by the way you live. Remember, He has identified you as His own, guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption. Now, I want you to look at what the Scripture says here. And really consider what it's saying. That the way you live can grieve the precious Holy Spirit. I don't want to do that. I don't want to live in a way that grieves Him. So that, of course, is a consequence of sin, but He still abides. Now, again, I want to make this clear. I'm not saying this means you can live however you want. I'm saying that if you're truly born again, you will want to live holy. And as you begin to take this journey, as you begin to submit yourself to this process of sanctification, that the Holy Spirit works with you. He works with you patiently. So why does it seem then that sometimes the Holy Spirit has abandoned us? What makes us feel that? Well, we've already established from Scripture that the Holy Spirit abides faithfully. In fact, let's read Ephesians 4.30. And do not bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit by the way you live. Look at this again here. Remember, He has identified you as His own, guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption. In fact, the Scripture very clearly calls the Holy Spirit the seal, meaning He's there to help you get it right. So this is the third time I'm confirming this because I don't want to confuse a new believer. So let me just say this clearly. It's not that we can go on sinning without consequence. It's that if you are truly a born again believer, you will cooperate with the Holy Spirit as He sanctifies you and that desire will never leave you. So again, why does it seem then like sometimes the Holy Spirit has left you? You may be feeling that right now. I feel like He's distant. I feel like He's a million miles away. I feel like God doesn't hear me. And you just kind of have this burden on you. This wandering, this confusion, this sense of doom, darkness, like you finally messed up, like you finally have done enough to exhaust His patience. He still loves you. He's still abiding with you. And He hasn't rejected you. We see that in Scripture. So you have to ask yourself, do I believe my feelings, or do I believe by faith what the Bible says? Well, you have to believe the Word. So when we establish that the Holy Spirit faithfully abides with the believer, then we can dismiss this idea that He has abandoned us. And once you've come to accept the Scripture, once you've started with the foundation of truth from Scripture, then you can begin to ask the right questions. You stop asking, why did the Holy Spirit leave me? And you begin asking, why do I feel like the Holy Spirit has left me even though the Scripture clearly indicates that He does not? Well, number one, here's one of the number one reasons why believers sometimes feel like God has distanced Himself from them. Number one is sin. You have compromise and sin in your life and you will feel distant from God. This does not mean that He has actually left you or abandoned you. Why? Because again, what sense would it make? For God to look down from the balcony of heaven and say, you know what? You made a mistake. You didn't live holy today. So now I'm going to remove from you the only power, the only chance, the only opportunity that you have to live holy. He wouldn't do that. Instead, for His child, He provides grace and grace is not a license to sin. Grace is the power to resist sin. Grace is the empowering, indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit that gives us the ability to walk in holiness. Look at Hebrews chapter 10 verses 21 and 22. And since we have a great high priest who rules over God's house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts, fully trusting Him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ's blood to make us clean and our bodies have been washed with pure water. So we can enter boldly. We can go right into the presence of God without disruption. Why? Because the conscience has been cleansed. When you sin, you have guilt, shame, a sense of inadequacy, and the enemy uses that shame, guilt, and sense of inadequacy to endorse His lie that God has rejected you. Now again, I'm not talking about that one who's just living how they want, not repenting, not trying, who's rebelling against God and saying, oh, there are no consequences. Oh, nothing bad's gonna happen to me because I doubt that kind of person is even saved to begin with. Let's just be honest. I'll put it to you bluntly. If somebody doesn't care about living holy or pleasing God or living a life that meets His standards, if they don't even care about that, then I doubt that they've ever received Christ truly. I doubt that they've ever been truly born again. But a true believer is gonna get frustrated with that sin in their life. They're gonna get frustrated with their mistakes. They're gonna become bold about resisting the flesh. There's gonna be this righteous indignation that rises up within them that says, I have to get this off of my life. I have to break free from this. And so sometimes though, you do fall into a mistake. Sometimes you do make a foolish choice. And then when you make that mistake suddenly now, you have feelings of shame, guilt, inadequacy, and you feel distant from God. And what does the enemy do? He takes the opportunity where your emotions are at an all-time low and he endorses his lies with your emotions. He uses your emotions to make his lie more believable. And then what do we do? We obsess about it. We wanna hear that our specific sin has been forgiven instead of just looking to the general instructions of scripture that clearly indicate to us that if we repent, we confess, we turn from that wrong doing that God forgives us. You don't need someone to sit down with you and go down a specific list of your specific sins and say, and confirm to you, oh yeah, that one's covered. Yeah, that one's covered. Yeah, that one's covered. No, you got full coverage with the blood of Jesus, not so that you can abuse that grace, but so that grace can empower you to live holy and righteous and finally get it right. So that's number one. You're living in sin consistently. You're practicing habitual sin. You're giving into temptation. Then of course you're gonna feel guilty. Of course you're gonna feel shame. And then of course the result of that is going to be that you feel distant from God. But again, that's your feelings. That's not reality. The word says he abides. Your feelings say he's abandoned me. Are you going to believe his word or your feelings? Number two, trials. In the same way that the enemy uses our mistakes to endorse his lie that God has abandoned us, so the enemy uses our trials to endorse his lie that God has abandoned us. Romans chapter eight, verses 35 through 37. Can anything ever separate us from Christ's love? Now look at the rhetorical question being asked here. Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity or are persecuted or hungry or destitute or in danger or threatened with death? As the scriptures say, for your sake we are killed every day. We are being slaughtered like sheep. No, despite all these things overwhelming victory is ours through Christ who loved us. Some of us think God's ignoring me or I'll hear believers say things like I've been praying to God for year after year after year and all these years I've been suffering. God's just completely ignored me and God's not answered my prayers and God is doing nothing but rejecting me. What are they doing? They're living by their feelings, not by the word. They're looking at their circumstances. They're looking at their trials. They're looking at the challenges and the tragedies that they face and they're allowing those circumstances to cause them to come to a conclusion that's against what the scripture teaches. But the Bible clearly tells us that just because we are persecuted or facing calamity or trouble or because we're hungry or destitute that doesn't mean that God has abandoned us. That's not an indication that God has rejected us. We shouldn't take that as a sign that we are now a million miles away from God. No, your trials are not proof that God is ignoring you. Your circumstances, specifically your negative circumstances aren't proof that God is ignoring you. But the enemy will try to take your circumstances and then use that as evidence to say, look, he's abandoned you. Well, first of all, if you believe that, then I think that you need to rethink what you think about the gospel. If you believe that trials are proof that God has abandoned you or trials are proof that God doesn't love you, then you need to revisit what you think about the gospel in a fundamental way. And finally, number three, a lack of devotion. Isaiah 26.3 says, This is a portion of Scripture that we read quite often here, but the fact of the matter is that what you focus on will produce feelings in you. So if you're lacking in prayer and the Word, of course you're going to feel like God is distant. You lack prayer and the Word and worship. You lack that connection, or I shouldn't even say you lack connection. Rather, I should say you lack the acknowledgement of that connection through prayer on the Word and worship. Of course, you're going to start feeling distant. You don't go to church. You don't pray daily. You're not reading the Word. You're not worshiping Him. You're not doing anything that causes you to acknowledge that presence. And because you're not doing those things that cause you to acknowledge that presence, you feel like He's distant. But again, those are only feelings. He's not abandoned you. He's not rejected you. He's with you. Jesus said, I'll send an advocate, and He will never leave you. He abides. Yes, you should live holy. No, it's not a license to sin. But if you've made a mistake, God doesn't withdraw His Holy Spirit from you. Instead, you grieve the Holy Spirit. Yes, but He abides. And He picks you up as a father with a child. And He says, let me help you do this. I'm not going to leave you to yourself destruction. I'm not going to give up on you. That's a word for someone right now. You need to know the Holy Spirit says, I'm not giving up on you. I am not giving up on you. He abides. So Father, I pray you help them to receive these truths. Come on, just let the Holy Spirit settle these realities in your heart and in your mind. Help them to receive these truths, despite what the enemy says. Help these truths to permeate their entire being. Let them live by these truths that you'll never leave us nor forsake us. That you've not rejected us. And that you will, Lord, finish the work that you started in us. For you are the author and the finisher of our faith. Give them peace, Lord, and let them sense your presence. In Jesus' name we pray. I want you to say it because you believe it, say amen. You enjoyed that message and you think others need to hear it. Make sure to leave a like. Don't forget to share. And if you want to hear more messages like this, make sure that you subscribe to my channel so that you can receive more content like this. By the way, do click that notification bell when you subscribe so that you can receive those notifications when we release new content. Now, I want to invite you to help our ministry continue its mission. The media we release is free. The events we host are free. And we want to continue to do this. Why? Freely we receive, so freely we give. And the way that we support these various different ministry outreaches is simple. It's faith and it's the faithfulness of God's people. I believe that God is moving many right now. I believe that God is speaking to you right now to become a participant, not just an observer, but a participant in a world evangelism. And we need your help. We need each other in the body of Christ. I need you, my brothers and sisters, to stand alongside this ministry as we continue our mission to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ all around the world in the power of the Holy Spirit. Will you help us do it? You can do that by going to DavidHernanIsMinistries.com slash donate to give a single donation. You can also become a monthly ministry supporter by going to DavidHernanIsMinistries.com slash partner. Think of all the things we pay monthly for, streaming platforms and gym memberships and gaming systems. And you name it, there are all kinds of memberships. Everything's on a monthly subscription these days. Why not add to that your support of this great ministry? Maybe you've been blessed by this ministry, maybe the Lord used it to touch your life in a certain way. Maybe you've received breakthrough from one of the teachings or one of the events or one of the books or one of the courses on Holy Spirit School, which we offer for free. And I want you to pay that forward. Help someone else receive the word too. The gospel is free, but the means to deliver it, that can get quite expensive, especially if you want to preach the gospel on a mass scale. So go right now, DavidHernanIsMinistries.com slash partner to become a monthly supporter today or DavidHernanIsMinistries.com slash donate to give a single gift. Everything counts. You can give from anywhere in the world all types of currency. We now take even cryptocurrency right there on that website. Go there now, support this great work, and I know the Lord will bless you for it. Thank you for your giving. Thank you for your support. And until next time, remember, nothing is impossible with God.