Jesus said that “the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such as these to worship Him.” (John 4:23 BSB) Are you one of the people that God is seeking to worship Him? Maybe you’re thinking, “I sure want to be. I love truth, and I love God. But how can I know if I’ve really found the truth?”

I get calls and emails from Jehovah’s Witnesses principally, though not exclusively, who’ve come to realize that the Organization they’ve always called “the truth” is, in fact, a total lie.

So, while still desiring to worship in spirit and in truth, they don’t know how to do that. They realize, as I did 14 years ago, that there is no religion out there that has the truth, even though every Christian denomination from the largest to the smallest claims to have the holy spirit. But that can’t be, can it? Remember, it’s worship “in spirit and in truth.” You can’t have one without the other. So, if they all claim to be guided by God’s holy spirit while at the same time teaching things contrary to one another, well…you get the picture.

Jesus told his disciples—not a church, mind you, his disciples—that:

“I still have much to tell you, but you cannot yet bear to hear it. However, when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth…He will glorify Me by taking from what is Mine and disclosing it to you. Everything that belongs to the Father is Mine. That is why I said that the Spirit will take from what is Mine and disclose it to you.” (John 16:12-15 BSB)

As this Scripture shows, the holy spirit does not get poured out on organizations, institutions, or corporate churches. To the contrary, it is poured out on individuals, and it is to individuals that God’s truth is revealed. It has always been this way! The prophets of old were individuals, and without exception, they were persecuted by organizations in the form of the established religions and nations of their day.

Now, we’re not suggesting that true worshippers, the children of God, can’t get together. That’s how it was in the first century. But if all the Christians in the world today were true worshippers, then there would be no divisions among them, right?

It is as the apostle Paul wrote: “Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” (1 Corinthians 1:10 NKJV)

I mean, it doesn’t take the brain of a genius to see that something is very wrong in Christendom today. In fact, the lies, deception and hypocrisy that typify the leadership of Christian religions have destroyed the faith and salvation hope of countless millions. Imagine the bloodguilt these religious leaders carry.

But for some of us, our leaving organized religion has not resulted in a loss of faith in God and his Son. We’ve embraced the anointing God has offered to all putting faith in the name of his Son, our savior, and so we can rightly call God our Father as Paul explains to the holy ones in Rome.

“So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, “Abba, Father.”” (Romans 8:15 NLT)

But because we are now self-aware, because we now strive to be critical thinkers, because we no longer put blind trust in men, we ask ourselves: “How can I know that I am truly being guided by holy spirit? How can I be sure I’m not deceiving myself?”

Every Christian religion uses the same book, doesn’t it? The truth is all there in the Bible and has been for centuries. So how is it possible that, while all Christian religions are using the same book, their teachings are so diverse and contradictory? The answer is that all these religions don’t have the holy spirit, even though they claim to have it.

So what, you might reason, they still have the Bible in plain English or whatever other language they speak. They can read, can’t they? Yes, but you see, they’re reading an encrypted book, and they don’t have the decryption key. God hasn’t given them the passcode, his holy spirit. So they read the Bible, but they misunderstand its message.

People have been using codes to hide secret messages in letters and documents since before the time of Christ, but eventually men have broken those codes. Not so with the Bible. You cannot fabricate the holy spirit and without it, you cannot truly understand God’s word. It’s meaning will be forever hidden from you. Jesus told us this:

“I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was well-pleasing in Your sight. All things have been entrusted to Me by My Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.” (Matthew 11:25, 26 BSB)

Jesus is not talking literally. He doesn’t mean that you have to be a very young child to understand the Bible, nor is he saying that wise, well-educated people are unable to understand God’s word. The context of chapter 11 of Matthew shows that Jesus is referring to the characteristic attributes of those who don’t understand the God’s message of Good News of his coming kingdom, which is essentially the message of the Bible.

The Pharisees were the most learned of men in Jewish society. They were revered as the wisest of men. Today, each organization has its own version of such religious leaders, like the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses who back in 2012 declared themselves to be the “wise and faithful servant.”

But we’re not concerned with such men now. What we want to understand is how do we not fall into that same trap of imagining we have the holy spirit of God when in fact, we do not.

Each of these religious leaders in the world of Christendom believes they have the truth and are guided by holy spirit. They say that they are the ones worshipping in spirit and truth. Do they know they are lying? I think not. I think it’s safer to say they are self-deluding. That fits with what Jesus foretold would happen when he returns:

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness!’” (Matthew 7:21-23 BSB)

Jesus doesn’t deny their claims. He just says that he doesn’t know them. That will come as quite a shock to them, wouldn’t you agree? I sure don’t want to be one of them, do you? But how can we be sure we are not? After all, everybody claims to have the holy spirit, even though the majority do not. It’s not like there’s a tongue of fire floating above your head or some other visible sign. Or is there?

According to the apostle Paul, there is:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22, 23 BSB)

These are nine qualities that are manifest in the true disciple of Christ. Taken together, these show the presence of God’s holy spirit.

Jehovah’s Witnesses will point to any church whose members are willing to go to war and kill other members of their faith who happen to be on the other side of the border in some battle, brother killing brother. Aha! You see, they can’t have the truth because they don’t love their brother. But Jehovah’s Witnesses claim they’re better than those religions, because they do not engage in war and preach that they remain neutral in all worldly and political affairs. But when we look a little closer, we see that love is not actually what is motivating them. 

For instance, it has been revealed that the Organization violated his own rule on neutrality during its 10-year affiliation with the United Nations Organization. That fact is little known among the JW community. There have been many occasions where honest-hearted JWs have pointed out this hypocrisy to their friends and family members.  They were speaking truth to power. Did the local elders treat these truth tellers with love and appreciation? No, they were persecuted and disfellowshipped. Their family and friends obeyed the unloving and evil command of the Governing Body to hatefully shun them.

But we must focus on the question: How can shunning someone for speaking the truth be loving? Would God approve?

But whether we are speaking about the Christian who goes to war or the Christian who shuns his brother for speaking truth, they both are practicing wickedness in the belief they are serving God.

How is that possible? Because they do not have the holy spirit. Now, I’m not saying that they don’t have the spirit, just that they don’t have the one we call holy. We all have a spirit that guides us, either the spirit of the world or the spirit of God.

The word in Greek for “spirit” is pneuma, meaning breath or wind.

In a physical sense, we live in a sea of air, the atmosphere, but in a spiritual sense the air surrounding us, the pneuma or breath is that of the world. To keep that air out, we need to be filled with the breath of God, the spirit of God. Take that out, and the spirit or breath of the world forces its way in.

The rulers of Israel, the chief priests, scribes and Pharisees believed they had God’s spirit, but in fact they were ruled by the spirit of the world which lies in the power of Satan. So, they did not perceive the truth. It was hidden from them, as Paul tells the Corinthians:

“Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”—” (1 Corinthians 2:6-9 ESV)

If we have God’s breath in us, his holy spirit, then we will understand the secret and hidden wisdom of God. But if we are empty of that spirit, then we will be filled with the spirit of the world, the spirit that guides this system of things, and we will be fooled into thinking we understand the Bible but we will only be deluding ourselves. We would never want to be like the rulers that Paul speaks of who are doomed to pass away.

Notice what Paul says about the marvellous hidden things that God has prepared for those who love him.

“But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For whom among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit…from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.” (1 Corinthians 2:10-13 BSB)

All these things cannot be understood by the people sitting in high places in the world’s Christian religions. But they fool themselves into believing they can understand the deep things of God, that God’s spirit has revealed these things to them. They delude themselves because the spirit within them is not from God.

If you think yourself wise and learned, your pride will block God’s spirit. But if you are humble and thirsting for knowledge like little children, you open yourself up to God’s spirit and leave no room for the spirit of Satan’s world. What Paul next reveals to the Corinthians helps us to understand why it is so difficult for our former friends in the Organization to see and rejoice over the truths we’ve uncovered in God’s word.

“But a physical man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot get to know [them], because they are examined spiritually. However, the spiritual man examines indeed all things, but he himself is not examined by any man. For “who has come to know the mind of Jehovah, that he may instruct him?” But we do have the mind of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:14-16 NWT 1984)

What Paul calls the “physical man” refers to the class of people that Jesus describes as “wise and learned” ones. The Greek word rendered in the NWT as “physical” is used, according to Strong’s Concordance, to mean “animal, natural, and sensuous”. Such a person is driven by ego. That ego does not allow them to understand the spiritual person. They will misjudge spiritual people, thinking they are foolish. Our former friends will assign all manner of reasons to explain away why we have left the Organization, what they think of as “the truth”. They call us proud, or vengeful, or resentful, or gullible, or something nasty like apostate. Anything to avoid the fact that the reason we left was because we were seeking to worship our heavenly Father in spirit and in truth, and like the first-century Jews, we had to abandon our former religion and face hateful persecution so that we’d have the freedom to worship the Father as he wants.

It is important to understand that there are only two classes of Christians. There are those led by the spirit of the world which produces wisdom that is “earthly, animal, demonic. For where jealousy and contentiousness are, there disorder and every vile thing are” (James 3:15b, 16 NWT).

For instance, such ones will read Jesus’ counsel about dealing with sinners in the congregation recorded at Matthew 18:15-17 and come up with the Satanic shunning policy that has brought reproach on Jehovah’s name and inflicted enormous psychological damage on people often to the point of suicide. They are the physical people that Paul speaks of who cannot examine the spiritual ones. They misjudge them. But the person led by God’s holy spirit examines all things. He or she knows why the physical people act as they do. Their fleshly and selfish motives are an open book to the spiritual person.

What we have learned in this analysis is that it is only by holy spirit that the deep things of God can be revealed to his children. Without it, those claiming to have it will arrive at wrong conclusions that will only cause harm to those who listen to and follow them.

In our next video, our final video in our series on shunning, we’ll see how the apostles were able to understand the meaning of Jesus’ words which have been hidden from the churches of Christendom. The holy spirit allowed them to see the true nature of what Jesus was proposing when he spoke of the process to keep the congregation clean from sin that is recorded in Matthew 18.

I look forward to delving into that topic in our next video. Until then, allow me, on behalf of the many helping us to provide these videos to  you, to express gratitude for your support.