When believers repeatedly compromise through small disobediences over weeks and months, the Holy Spirit's influence gradually fades unnoticed. You lose prayer, Scripture devotion, and the peace and joy of sensing God's presence, though the Spirit itself doesn't abandon you. The decline happens so slowly you stop noticing it's gone.
We are either maximizing the influence of the Holy Spirit or we are minimizing the influence of the Holy Spirit. But when we minimize the influence of the Holy Spirit, his influence diminishes over time so that many times, in fact, most of the time, we do not recognize that his influence is being diminished. And before you know it, you look up and you see that old habits have returned. You look up and you see that old attitudes have crept back in. Your life has taken a completely different direction. Maybe you look up and suddenly you notice there's no prayer life anymore. There's no devotion to the Word anymore. There's compromise. In sin. And you say, how did I get here? You got there by decisions that you made over time. You got there little by little through compromise throughout each day, each week, each month. And here's the scary part: you become used to life without his influence. You become used to life without the sense of his presence. Well, nothing scares me more than to realize that I could lose the sense of his presence. Now notice I said the sense, because the Holy Spirit doesn't abandon you, but that beautiful resting glory that believers sense on them, that peace, that love, that joy, that It can be diminished through ongoing disobedience. To learn more about the Holy Spirit, get Holy Spirit: God Within You at encounterthespirit.com.
