Encountered by the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2
- John Beeson
- Aug 18, 2025
- 20 min read
Updated: Aug 3
Encountered by the Spirit
John Beeson
1 Corinthians 2
So I don't know if anyone else had the troubling experience in your childhood of growing up
in a sugarless cereal home. Anyone else subnavigating that trauma? Yeah, yeah. Cheerios,
Grape Nuts, Wheaties, and none of this.
I remember as a kid, you know, watching the proliferation of ads for sugared cereals on tv,
and, man, it was just like a whole other kingdom, right? These happy people eating from
you on happy charms. They're magically delicious. I mean, it really did seem magical, that
other side of childhood, right? The magical life of sugared cereals.
And then I. I had the opportunity to taste frosted Lucky Charms.
It was not magical.
These marshmallows that I thought would be the size of my hand were tiny little things I
thought would be fluffy and, well, marshmallowy. And they tasted closer to cardboard than
to marshmallows. You know, it's funny, right? Like, so true about our life and our world. The
promises of magic, of the supernatural, of the spiritual experiences in this world so often
fall flat like lucky charms.
We're going to navigate today the reality of an invitation into a spiritual life. And it's not the
kind of spiritual life that the world, the world offers. You see that the spiritual life of the
world, a natural spirituality, if we could call it that, is maybe pushed up, created by, by their
own longings and desires for something magical, and yet falls flat. 30% of Americans today
consult astrology, tarot cards, etc. You could, you could Google this.
It's. Those are not scientifically verified. In fact, they've been found to be false. To the extent
that there is spirituality in those types of things, it is not a spirituality of God. And then you
have people reacting against that.
A more scientific mindset, a naturalistic mindset. I. What, what is, is. That's all that is in the
world. A world shut off from the supernatural.
A world that looks at the rainbow and says, yeah, that's not magic, my friend. That's called
refraction. Right? It happens in the world of religion, of Christianity too. You have certain
types of churches that seem to gin up an experience, a spiritual experience, but then you
peel back the layers and it's.
It's false. Unfortunately, there have been churches that have been found to fraud people on
this. Churches that claim that there's holy dust clouds of God coming down, only to be
discovered that they put literally gold glitter in the ductwork. Churches that fake healings,
false, fake spirituality. And there's churches that are so afraid of that spiritual world, so
buttoned up that heaven Forbid you experience a single emotion in a service churches of
legalism and of tradition and of starched colors.
We've been walking through this sermon series called Good News in the Real world. And in
1 Corinthians 2 today, as we navigate the book of First Corinthians, we're going to see that
Paul tells us there is a true spiritual experience that God has for us, that God has created
us to be spiritual beings and God, the Holy Spirit, desires to encounter us. You are meant to
to encounter the Holy Spirit of God. And that's an invitation for both sides, whatever side
you are on. For some of us it's going to require setting down a woo woo lucky charm
spirituality.
For others of us, it's going to be opening the door to something spiritual. When we've tried
to shut that all down in our lives, our spirits were designed to encounter the Holy Spirit of
God. Designed. In this series, Paul's about to get to issues that are facing the church and he
pauses at the beginning to say, but before we get to any issues, before we try and tackle
those, you have to be we looked at this a couple weeks ago. You have to be focused on
Jesus Christ last week.
You cannot trust simply in knowledge, in the wisdom of the world today. Specifically, you
have to have to be in harmony with, led by the Holy Spirit of God. It's the only way. So let's
go to the passage 1 Corinthians chapter 2, beginning just in the first couple verses. And I
when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with
lofty speech or wisdom.
For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. When I
came to you, I, I wasn't preaching with fancy words. I wasn't preaching to you with, with
great oratory gifts. I came with simplicity because I wanted you to meet Jesus. Jesus, not
simply intellectual truth or my speech.
Jesus, that is who you need. Now there's a truth in this passage that will unfold as it goes.
To the extent that we say Jesus is here, or we're in the presence of Jesus, or we hear God
whisper to us or speak to us or guide us in all of those things. What we really mean is the
Holy Spirit. Anytime we feel God directing us, we feel the presence of God.
We feel Jesus with us. It is Jesus and the Father who are with us through the Holy Spirit, the
third person of the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Paul continues,
he says, and I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. And my speech
and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom but in demonstration of the spirit
and of power. That your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
I did not come to you with, with convincing words of wisdom that were going to convince
you of truth. I came in weakness. That you would have the spirit of God inside of you,
changing you from the inside. Now it's not that Paul is against knowledge, against study.
We're to love God with all of our mind as well of all of our heart.
You see, there's truth that goes past the mind's ability. There's truth that goes deeper than
our ability to comprehend. I, I don't understand. I, I, I look at all of creation. Sometimes I
simplify it down to little things I like, like fruit.
I don't know how a watermelon grows from a watermelon seed. You can study, you can look
it up and no one knows. The best answers in the world come down to some miracle that
happens and out comes a watermelon. I don't get how a kiwi, you cut open a kiwi. A kiwi is
beautiful.
You look at the kiwi, just, it looks like this star exploding from the inside and that all these
little dots or seeds make another kiwi. I don't get an orange, for lack of a better word. A
collection of, of all kinds of little small pouches of orange juice that are gathered together in
a tight cluster and sealed in a, in a little shell and then put together in this circle all around
these shells. And how that causes a seed to grow into another tree, I don't know. I don't
know.
I can study. And yet you still come down to a miracle of God somewhere in the midst and
life begins. Paul saying there's truth that is deeper than human ability to comprehend or
study. And if we're going to get to these issues, one truth. We have to get down.
We have to, we have to come allowing our spirit to be in touch with the Holy Spirit or we'll
never be able to enter that truth. Our spirits were designed to encounter the Holy Spirit. It's
true Christianity is not anti intellectual, but it, it invites us to this, this place of, of
recognition. There's a, there's a stopping point of our intellect. It's like trying to explain color
to a colorblind person.
I was looking at some of these mysteries this week. Scientists say that much of our
universe is made of dark energy and yet can't fully explain what Dark energy is. I remember
as a high school student taking chemistry and learning that an electron is a wave and a
particle, and my mind melted.
How could it be there? There are deeper truths of this world that we can plumb as human
beings. But the Spirit of God is meant to meet us and illumine our minds, illumine our
hearts in understanding. Paul continues down in verse 10 he says this. These things God
has revealed to us through the Spirit.
For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's
thoughts except the Spirit of that person which is in him? So also no one comprehends the
thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. So packed in those two little verses are these
incredible depths of understanding in who God is and who we are. We are, if you want to
use the $5 words of theology and anthropology.
And they point all the way back to the beginning of the story. Paul, I mean Greg last week
took us back to the beginning of Genesis. I want to do that again. Genesis one, it's the very
first book of the Bible. Speaking of the creation, Chapter one, verse two speaks of this
triune God, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
One God in three persons, and specifically of the work of the Spirit in creation. Listen to
Genesis 1:2. The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. The Spirit of God is the
part of God that reaches, extends out to creation, that manifests God to his creation.
From the beginning is acting the Spirit like a dove over her brood, over her, over her
chicklets. God hovers in his Spirit, draws near to his creation in his spirit. And so it
continues to be God. The Spirit encounters us. And how does God encounter us?
In our spirit. We were created by God to have a means of encountering God, the Spirit. We
see that in Genesis 2 as God creates Adam. We hear this Genesis 2 7. Then the Lord God
formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and
the man became a living creature.
Now our English translations are using that word breath. It's the Hebrew word ruach. R U A
C H is our transliteration. Can you say that? Ruach, Ruach, ruach.
It's the same word for breath and for spirit. When we say spirit, we're also saying breath.
And so the. There's this profound reality that God has made human beings as dust, as
material, and then breathed in, spirited into them. We human beings are material plus
spirit.
We are spiritual Beings. We are material and spiritual beings. God has breathed his breath
into us from the very beginning. The very creation of human beings made in the image of
God were made so that our spirit was made to encounter the spirit of the living God. You
hear it spoken today as a popular phrase.
I'm spiritual, but I want nothing to do with God or with church. Now, it's true that human
beings have a spirit in them. It's true that there is a spiritual realm and nature in all the
world. So that in culture, in art, in music, there is a spirit to things.
But our spirits were designed to connect with the Holy Spirit, with God himself. We see it as
the passage continues to unfold. Pay attention to how the word spirit is capitalized or left
with a small S. For we have a spirit, small S. There is a spirit of the world, small S. There's a
spirit in music and culture, small S. Even if you connect that to the demonic of a spiritual
realm, it is small S, capital S, meaning God. Passage continues in verse 12. Now we have
received not the Spirit of the world, small S, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might
understand the things freely given us.
And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit of God,
interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. If we are Christians, we connect to
God spiritually and the Spirit opens our eyes to be able to see God. In fact, it continues,
verse 14. The natural person, that's a. A person without the Spirit of God.
There's still a spirit, but not the Spirit of God. A natural person does not accept the things of
the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them because
they are spiritually discerned.
A natural person can't understand God, the glory of God, the splendor of God, not without
the Spirit of God touching them from the inside. It's why if we're sharing Jesus with
somebody and we get frustrated, we share and we share and we share and they just don't
get it. The answer in that equation is not that we have to be more creative in order to
convince them of the truth. The answer to that equation is that we must pray God. Take the
scales off and let them see.
Make them new on the inside. Help them feel your presence. We are designed to connect
with the Holy Spirit. Now we might. We might hear that and think, well, do I have the Holy
Spirit?
Do I have the supernatural power of God, the third Person of the Trinity, making me new on
the inside? Do I have The Holy Spirit. And the answer to that question, if you are a Christian,
you have the Holy Spirit, whether you're aware of it or not. If you are a Christian, if you have
surrendered your life to Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit in you. Salvation and receiving the
Holy Spirit are not two separate things.
They are the same thing. You receive the Holy Spirit when you become a Christian. So a
passage that spells this out pretty clearly is in Romans, chapter 8, verse 9. It says, you,
however, talking of Christians. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit capital S.
If in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you.
Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. If you have the Spirit
of Jesus Christ inside of you, you are a Christian. If you do not have the Holy Spirit inside of
you, you're not. So if you, if you've surrendered your life to Christ, you have the Holy Spirit in
you, you might say, well, okay, but then how, how do I get filled with the Spirit? How do I
walk in the Spirit?
How do I connect more in the Spirit? We could go through like a 12 week series just on that.
Maybe we will someday. One verse that probably helps solve that more than any other is in
Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 18. It introduced a passage that simply says this.
And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery. But be filled with the Spirit. Don't get
drunk with wine, but be. Get drunk with the Holy Spirit. Don't get drunk with wine, but go
into your pantry, grab a bottle of the Holy Spirit and drink away.
And get drunk on the Holy Spirit. You said, fantastic. But I don't have a bottle of the Holy
Spirit in my pantry. How, how, how would I get drunk on the Holy Spirit? And the passage
itself gives us four concrete answers to that, four participles.
Right after. Get drunk with the Holy Spirit. Be filled with the Holy Spirit. That answers that
first is he is. Greet one another with psalms.
Greet one another with psalms with the Word of God. This word is tethered to the Holy
Spirit. And while it's possible to approach it from just an earthly wisdom point of view, this
word is God, breathed Ruach. God spirited. It is tethered to the Holy Spirit.
You want to get filled with the Holy Spirit? Come to the Word of God, Surrender to the Spirit
and let him fill you. Greet one another. Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs making melody
to God in your heart. I would say, how do you, how do you get filled with the Holy Spirit in
the Word of God?
And in singing Worship to God. There's a reason that in our worship services we go to the
Scripture every single week. Why? Because it is tethered to the Spirit of God. There is a
reason why when we gather for worship, we.
We worship in song and we sing to God. Why? Because God inhabits the worship of his
people. He inhabits the praise of his people. We can interact with the Holy Spirit in His
Word.
We interact with the Holy Spirit in song. In Ephesians, chapter 5, in that passage he says,
greet one another. Then with psalms, hymns, spiritual songs. Giving thanks. A third means
giving thanks.
Gratitude. Come and be filled with the Spirit and the Word of God. In worshiping him in
music and in gratitude, just reflect on all the favor God has shown over you in life. And in
gratitude you meet the Holy Spirit. And the last one that he gives us an example of in the
passages, in submitting to one another, we don't think of it in the gathered community of
God's people.
As we set aside our preferences and we submit to others mutually, we find the Holy Spirit of
God, who Father, Son and Holy Spirit have beautifully submitted to each other for all
eternity. So he says, come and be filled with the Holy Spirit in the Word, in worship, in
gratitude, in the mutual submission of the body of Christ.
Do you hear what Paul's saying to us? Listen. There's a false spirituality in this world, a
lower case S spirituality, a lucky charms, magically delicious spirituality in this world. I'm
not talking about that. Talking about the Holy Spirit encountering you, the real thing.
Now, if any of you are like me, this was a convicting week for me as I sat in the scriptures
and prepared for this.
I'm a guy who's more comfortable, like neck above. That's safe zone for me. You get below
the neck and feelings and emotions, like it's less comfortable for me. Talking about being
drunk, in the spirit, filled with a spirit. These are things that even parts of me has like
caution flags against.
There is abuse there, there's abuse there.
But there is a real spiritual encounter that you were made for. And if you shut down that
world because of cynicism, because of self protection, because you're more comfortable
with a faith that's lived up in your mind and not impacting your heart, you are missing out on
what God has made you for.
I was convicted. I was listening to a series of podcasts about just kind of some of the work
that appears to be happening, especially in America, but around the world as well. A kind of
a fresh work of God in 2024, May of 2024, there was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on a
small little college campus called Asbury in Wilmore, Kentucky. Started all with a. Just a
regular chapel service.
This is a Christian college, regular chapel service, mandatory attendance. The guy who
preached at that chapel service, his name is Zach Mere Crebs. He actually said it was a
dud, texted his wife. That was a stinker. After he preached.
And the Spirit of God showed up. And people began to linger afterward. And then more and
more began to join as the Spirit of God was poured out in repentance and in worship in his
people. And for 16 days around the clock, people gathered in worship in repentance, and
the work of God was poured out. Now, I'll just confess as I even, like as I heard about this as
it was happening.
And there's just this cynic in me that like, has questions about those types of things. And
I'm not here to tell you what is and isn't authentic in terms of the work of the Spirit of God.
That's. That's not my job. That's for.
That's for God to tell. But I'll share. Even just this week, as I was listening to that pastor who
preached that stinker of a sermon where in the Spirit of God showed up. He gave testimony
to some of the work of God there. And it began to convict me of my own cynicism to the
work of the Spirit.
I want to share one story with you that he shared. This is Zach Meerkrebs. He shares this
story. We had this basketball, basketball player who's kind of bad news. And he was pretty
much still on our campus because he was really good at basketball Christian College.
And he just sat there in that room for days. He wasn't a believer, but he sat in that room for
days because his girlfriend was a believer. And he ends up giving his life to the Lord. And he
walks out of the room and he runs into a man in a wheelchair with some tumors that you
could see around his face. And he goes back, he grabs his girlfriend because he had seen
others in that space praying for healing.
He was like, well, now I'm a believer. I can pray for him. And he prays for this guy. And this
guy was healed. Tumors visibly disappear.
This is a basketball player who'd known Jesus for 30 minutes. Why did God work through
him? And then this is Pastor Zach Mercre's answer. Because he didn't know any better. And
so many of us know better.
I don't Know, if that's you, that can be me, I know better. And so I live in a world that's
protected from this scary place where the Spirit of God can actually show up and
encounter us because of a cynicism in my heart, because I've sealed off my spirit from the
spirit of the living God who longs to encounter me and who longs to encounter you. We
were made to encounter the Spirit in the Book of Acts. There's three circumstances in
which there are disciples of Jesus and of John the Baptist, disciples who did not know
about the Holy Spirit. They weren't in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came down at
Pentecost.
And so while they believed in Jesus and they were followers of Jesus, they didn't know
about the Holy Spirit. And the apostles would come in contact with these groups of people,
and they say, have you received the Holy Spirit? They said, well, we don't know what that
even means.
I was like that a little bit. So when I became a Christian, I was 15 years old, and I grew up for
those years of high school in a really solid discipling church. It was a puritan church, and
Puritan churches have lots and lots of godly strengths. The movement of the Holy Spirit is
not one of those strengths. If you want to get grounded in the word of God and learn to trust
and obey God, appear it in church is fantastic.
If you want to learn to surrender to the Holy Spirit, to have the Holy Spirit guide your mind
and your heart, not so much. So I grow up through high school learning about God. I was a
Christian. I had the Holy Spirit inside of me. I just really wasn't aware of what that meant.
And I go to college, and in college I was a part of a very charismatic campus ministry out of
a church in Fort Collins. And I would say it was not that doctrinally grounded. It was. That
was not his strength. It had Holy Spirit stuff going on.
In fact, it had abuses of Holy Spirit stuff, like, all over the place as a regular part of worship.
And I'm not. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'll say I learned for the first time
about really the existence of the Holy Spirit, about the third person, the Trinity, and how
there was supernatural power available to work in me and that I could partner with that by
surrendering to that, by coming under that, by welcoming that, and it changed my life.
There's an invitation here.
Do you hear it? Paul is instructing the Corinthian Church, and they have all kinds of issues
and they have all kinds of issues, by the way, with the Holy Spirit. But before he gets to the
issues, say, we've got to set everything aside. There's not a chance we can go into this fairly.
If we try to understand, if we try to go in with our own strength, our own minds, our own
ability to study our own knowledge of God's word from a human perspective, there isn't a
chance.
We have got to be surrendered to the Holy Spirit. And there's an invitation here for you and
me to go beyond the measures of a natural world, to surrender, to live with the Holy Spirit.
Today we usually close our sermons here at New Life with application. How do we take this
into our lives? Instead, today we want to close with three invitations to prayer, three prayers
to pray.
As we step out of this sermon, we're going to actually create space after the sermon as we,
even before we go into worship, to respond in those prayers. And they're prayers we also
want us to take into our weeks. This week, the first prayer is simply this. Spirit, would you
open my eyes? Spirit, would you open my eyes?
Maybe you're in that place where you're like, yeah, I believe in Jesus. I believe this is the
word of God. I believe in this stuff, but I've never stepped into it. I've never given my heart.
I've never met the Spirit. Spirit to Spirit, would you pray? Spirit, would you open my eyes?
There's an invitation there, even for repentance. Spirit, forgive me, God, forgive me for the
way in which I've depended on myself.
I've shut you off. I've created this religious life without you. Spirit, would you open my eyes?
Second prayer is this. Spirit, would you keep me in step with you?
Would you keep me in step with you? Over in Galatians, Paul has a similar passage to
Ephesians. Ephesians, he talks about it being filled with the Spirit. In Galatians, he talks
about it being in step with the Spirit. Here's what he Sundays.
In Galatians 5:25, Paul says this. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the
Spirit. That is to say, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, if you've given your your life to him,
if you've entrusted yourself to him, then what is it to be connected with the Spirit of God in
your life so that you're living in step with him, you're listening to him, engaged with him.
Greg's already given some of those footholds. Over in Ephesians 5, listening to the Spirit of
God in his word, in worship, in gratitude, in submission, connected to the community of
God.
Maybe there's one of those in your life that you're out of step with, that you're like, yeah, not
that one. I'm not going there. I'm, I'm going to cordon that one off. I'm going to protect
myself, remain in control of that area.
There's probably repentance there for a lot of us today. God, forgive me for the ways in
which I have not been in step with you. Forgive me for the ways in which I've tried to do this
life on my own. Second prayer, Spirit, would you keep me in step with you, Spirit? Would
you open my eyes, Spirit, Would you keep me in step?
A third prayer, Spirit, would you open the eyes of the one I love? Maybe it's a spouse, a
friend, son or daughter, parents, neighbor, brother or sister at Christ, you know, someone,
and they, they. I don't know. I've known people, for them singing, like engaging in worship is
this which not only pushes away singing, it pushes away the Holy Spirit. As the Spirit's
inviting us in, he's saying, I want you to experience.
I want to be in you. I want to flow through you. I want you to grow with me in your mind, in
your heart.
So perhaps we're praying for ourselves to have our eyes opened more. Perhaps it's a prayer
for ourselves to keep in step with, be filled with. Perhaps it's a prayer for someone else.
Now, at the close of every service, we always open up the altar and say, if you're in need of
prayer, would like someone to come alongside, you know, please come down. And, you
know, our norm is maybe a dozen people or something like that come down.
Because we're not really a come down church. Back to strengths and weaknesses. We're
not a, we're a, hey, God will meet me right here. Not moving very much. Fine.
He might meet me in my car on my way home in the safest environment. I know. But we're
going to perfectly kind of open up the altar more to a type of an altar call this morning.
Maybe the Holy Spirit is nudging you.
Say, I want, I want more of you, Holy Spirit. I want to surrender to you, Holy Spirit. Open my
eyes. Help me keep in step. Open the eyes of a loved one.
And so we're going to have a time as we close, where we're going to have a few minutes of
just quiet music. And I would invite you to come forward. You might say, well, can the Holy
Spirit meet me in my chair just as much as if I come forward. Maybe, but he's nudging you.
Respond.
Don't let it slip by. Respond. There. There is power in responding to him, in moving to him, in
bowing down before him, in receiving. So I would invite you to come forward.
Just have a time of prayer for more of the Holy Spirit in your life. After a few minutes of
quiet, the music will turn into our closing song. And so if you'd like someone to pray with
you, prayer team will be up here. Just give a nod or glance. Someone will be glad to pray
with you, for you, over you.
If you'd like just private space to kneel down and pray, please come, let's pray. Lord, I. I pray
over myself and over us. Corporately, you, Holy Spirit. You are God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
We want more of you.
Want to surrender to you. Would you immerse us deeper into your presence? Propel us
deeper into you. Consume us. Heart, soul, mind, strength, all that we are.
That as spiritual beings, we might live this day in a continual encounter with you, Holy
Spirit. So I ask that you would anoint this time of prayer, that you would draw us as a whole
family deeper into your presence. For more of you, for your glory and for our good. In Jesus
name we pray. Amen.
