Under the Influence
Isa 7:2 And it was told the house of David, saying, Syria is confederate with Ephraim. And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.
In life there are negative and positive things that will exert an influence upon your speech, actions, and thoughts.
In the Isaiah passage we learn once again that words are containers.
They can carry fear or faith,
Anger or peace,
Conviction or lust.
We see the house of David came under the influence of a spirit of fear, and it caused them to act and behave as if a gale force wind of fear attacked them. Which is very interesting. The text seems to be describing a situation where a bad news report caused them to be knocked around. There was a force and a power behind those words that caused them to be so affected.
This begs the question what influences are you most susceptible to?
In John 3 we read this:
Joh 3:8 "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."
In a nutshell Jesus is saying that there is a visible and tangible effect that can be observed in the life of people who are touched by the Spirit of God. People may not see God directly but they should be able to see the effect He is making in your life.
When you look out the window and see it is windy, you are not seeing the wind, you only see the effect the wind is having on a particular object that causes you to say the wind is blowing. God has so ordained this life that people don't see Him, but He wants them to see the effect He is having on us, so that they can conclude wind (God) is real even though they can't see it.
1. The first thing I want to say about being under the influence of the Spirit is that it simply is God flavoring your life.
Think of the chef Emeril. Bam!
Spices change the flavor of food. When you are under the influence of the Spirit of God, God is changing your flavor. Its not so much about doing something as it is about you becoming flavored the way God wants you.
The moving of the Spirit is often more about influences in your heart and mind than it is about doing something.
Jud 13:24 And the woman bare a son, and called his name Samson: and the child grew, and the LORD blessed him.
Jud 13:25 And the Spirit of the LORD began to move him at times in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.
This is an interesting text concerning the moving of the Spirit of the Lord, because we are not told of Samson actually doing anything as a consequence of it. Later we will read that when the Spirit of the Lord comes on him he ripped a lion in two, another time he rips multiple ropes off himself, another time he takes the jawbone of a donkey's carcass and kills a thousand Philistines with it. But in this case nothing visible happens. Nothing that we can see anyway, but there is a clue in the text that indicates what might have been going on.
Dan is the Hebrew word for judge; Zorah means hornet, and Eshtaol means entreaty.
Reading this verse they way a Hebrew person would, it comes out like this, "And the Spirit of the LORD began to move him at times in the camp of the judge between the hornet and earnestly asking."
In the camp of God, because of all the Philistine hornets encircling them Samson began to really cry out to God about the situation.
I think the text is trying to tell us this was about God placing a burden and a calling on the life of Samson. A burden in a persons life is evidence that someone is living, "under the influence." Under the hidden promptings and workings of the Spirit of God.
Let me tell you something about a God given burden that you won't often hear. It involves secret pain and suffering.
The Spirit moves upon Samson and he begins to be wounded with the idea the enemy is ruling over God's people. God is influencing him with a wind that says, "this ought not to be so."
2ndly Samson is wounded with the inability to do anything about it just yet. He will have a season of just sitting under the suffering of what he perceives as wrong. It is not time to act, it is time for a burden to grow.
On the screen is a powerpoint that shows the 7 stages in the life of a bannana. You don't eat it when it is green you have to let it mature. In the same way God gives us a burden before He gives us a mission. Let the bannana mature.
Jas 1:4 So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.
Ills: many years ago I preached a message on the burden of the Lord, a phrase you will find often in the ministry of the OT prophets. Usually phrased this way, "The burden of the Word of the Lord...
The message was very simply about trying to get the congregation to take a moment and stop thinking about what they are burdened about, and try to hear what God is burdened about.
Prayer is often us talking to God about my burden, my burden, my burden, and I think sometimes God would like to talk to us about His burden. Anyway a few days later, my daughter Jael, who was about 5 years old at the time was in my office and she had a music stand, and a few of my sermon notes, she was in her undies and she had one of my ties on around her neck. Quite a sight. I walked in on her and she was preaching up a storm on how we had to have the burden of the Lord. Another time, she was preaching on how we have got to believe the Lord. Both times she had been preaching up a storm with no one else around. She was under the influence, and God was forming passions for which at that time in her life there was no release other than to verbalize it back to God.
Sometimes being under the influence of the Spirit of God is exactly that, we verbalize back to Him what He is stirring our heart about! It is called a prayer burden.
Let me use another illustration. Let's use the flu as an example of being under the influence.
First to get the flu, you have to come in contact with someone who is infected. When you do, what they have will jump on you, and then it has a season of incubation and multiplication, finally it gets to the point where it has increased to the point where it can jump out of you onto others.
That is what being under the influence of the Spirit of God is, you get exposed to His burden, it grows in you, and then it spills out to others.
2ndly when you are under the influence you are uninhibited.
Wine uninhibits you to do evil, the Spirit uninhibits you to do good. You shall be witnesses of Me.
The problem with too many of us is that we have sobered spiritually to the point we don't tell others of
Christ. You need a fresh swig of the Spirit of God. I apologize for the way I am saying that, but you get the point, we need to become so under the influence we are uninhibited in our sharing of Christ. Paul said, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation." When people are ashamed or inhibited in their sharing of Christ it is evidence they are living under the influence of the wrong spirit.
Lastly, when you are under the influence it changes your walk.
Wine you can't walk straight, the Holy Ghost you can't walk crooked.
People under the influence often don't realize how much their walk has been affected!
Close: I need to be under the influence of God.
