How can a church grieve the Holy Spirit corporately?

Question 4197.

We usually think it is possible to grieve the Spirit only as individuals, in the privacy of our own hearts, but Paul’s warning was written to a whole church and aimed at the way its members treated one another. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption (Ephesians 4:30). Read the verses around it and you find Paul is not chiefly addressing the secret sins of solitary believers; he is addressing how a congregation speaks, forgives, and behaves together. A church, not only a Christian, can grieve the Holy Spirit, and the thought ought to sober every fellowship.

What it means to grieve a Person

Before we can see how a church does it, we need to feel the force of the word. To grieve the Spirit is to cause Him sorrow, and you can only grieve someone who loves you. You do not grieve a force or a power; you grieve a Person, and a Person who cares. That Paul can speak of grieving the Spirit is one of the clearest proofs that He is a Person and not an influence, with real affections that our sin can wound. The picture is of a loving friend pained by the conduct of those He is devoted to, and that is a far more searching thought than the idea of breaking an impersonal rule. I have written more on the everyday shape of this in my answer on how we grieve the Spirit in practice.

Notice too what Paul attaches to the warning. The Spirit by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Even in the act of warning us, Paul reminds us that our security is untouched; the sealing holds. To grieve the Spirit is not to lose Him, for He is God’s permanent mark of ownership on the believer. To grieve the Spirit, then, is to sadden the very One who has pledged Himself to keep us. That makes the grieving worse, not lighter, because it is grief caused to a friend who will never abandon us.

How a whole church can grieve the Spirit

Now look at what Paul sets on either side of the warning, because that is where he tells us how a congregation can grieve the Spirit. Just before it he says, let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up (Ephesians 4:29). Just after it he says, let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice (Ephesians 4:31). These are not solitary vices; they are the sins of a community. Cutting speech, simmering bitterness, the gossip that travels round a fellowship, the slander that quietly assassinates a brother’s reputation, the malice nursed against someone in the next pew. A church marinated in these grieves the Spirit who dwells in its midst.

So the corporate grieving of the Spirit is largely a matter of how we treat each other. When a congregation tolerates a culture of criticism, when factions form and tongues wag, when offences are hoarded rather than forgiven, the Spirit is grieved across the whole body. He came to bind these people together in love, and they are using their words to tear at one another instead. There is something especially painful in this, that the Spirit’s own dwelling-place should become a den of small cruelties. The grieving is corporate because the sin is corporate.

Tolerated sin grieves Him too

A church can also grieve the Spirit by what it allows. Paul rebuked the Corinthians not only for the man living in open sin but for their complacency about it: you are arrogant, ought you not rather to mourn? (1 Corinthians 5:2). A congregation that shrugs at flagrant, unrepented sin in its midst grieves the Holy Spirit, who is holy and whose temple the church is. So does a church that grows cold toward the lost, indifferent to the worship of God, careless with the truth. The Spirit has aims for His people, and a fellowship that drifts from those aims and feels no concern about the drifting is a fellowship grieving Him by its very contentment.

This is not about a church being imperfect, for every church is that and the Spirit bears patiently with us. It is about a church being unconcerned, settling into sin or coldness with no grief of its own. The opposite of grieving the Spirit is not flawlessness; it is a tender, responsive fellowship quick to repent. A grieved Spirit in a complacent church is a danger precisely because the church does not feel it, and so does not turn.

What a grieved Spirit withdraws

What happens when a church grieves the Spirit? He does not depart, for the sealing is permanent, but His felt presence and His freedom to work are dampened. The grieving and the quenching of the Spirit run close together here, and I have drawn out the difference in my answer on grieving versus quenching the Spirit. A congregation that grieves Him will often find the life draining out of its gatherings, the preaching growing flat, the prayer meetings thin, conversions rare, joy scarce. Not because the Spirit has abandoned them, but because a grieved Spirit no longer moves among them with the liberty He would.

This explains a good deal that churches blame on other causes. We reach for new programmes and better music and fresh strategies when the real trouble is that the Spirit in our midst is grieved by our bitterness and our cold tongues. No amount of activity will restore what only repentance can. The church that wonders where its old power went would often do better to ask whom it has been grieving than to ask what method it has been missing.

The way back is together

Because the grieving is corporate, so is the repentance. Paul’s remedy is not private alone; it is a whole church putting away the bitterness and clamour and taking up something better: be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you (Ephesians 4:32). The path back from grieving the Spirit is a congregation that stops its corrupting talk, lays down its grudges, forgives as it has been forgiven, and tends again to the holiness and worship it had let slip. Where a fellowship does this together, the Spirit is no longer grieved, and His life returns to the body. This same repentance is what keeps a church from the division that grieving so often breeds.

It often begins with one or two. A single member who stops carrying tales, who forgives the old wound, who pleads with God for the church’s coldness, can be the place the thaw starts. The Spirit honours such repentance and uses it to soften a whole body. You do not have to wait for everyone to change before you stop grieving Him yourself.

How to tell when a church is grieving Him

How would a fellowship even know it had begun to grieve the Spirit, given that complacency dulls the very sense that something is wrong? The surest gauge is not how busy or how full the church is, but how it treats its own people. Listen to the talk in the car park and after the service. Is it warm, building up, generous, or is it laced with criticism and the quiet relaying of other people’s faults? A church that has learned to grieve the Spirit will have a tongue problem long before it has a programme problem, and the bitterness will usually be defended as honesty or discernment. The Spirit is grieved wherever the speech that should heal is being used to wound.

Another sign is hardness toward repentance, both in giving and receiving it. A church that finds it difficult to forgive, that holds grudges across years, that makes the returning sinner grovel rather than welcoming him as Paul urged, is a church that grieves the Spirit even as it congratulates itself on its standards. He is the Spirit of the Father who runs to meet the prodigal, and a fellowship that cannot run to meet its own is out of step with Him. So the question every church should ask is not chiefly whether it is large or active, but whether it is tender, quick to forgive, careful with its words, and grieved by its own sin rather than by everyone else’s.

So, now what?

If your church feels strangely lifeless, resist the urge to blame the building, the budget, or the people you already disagree with. Ask instead whether the fellowship has been grieving the Holy Spirit, and then ask it of yourself first. Is there corrupting talk on your lips, bitterness in your heart, a grudge you have refused to release? The Spirit who is grieved is the Spirit who has sealed you and will never let you go, and He is only waiting for His people to turn. Will you be one of the first to put away the bitterness and let Him bring the life back?

“And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”

Ephesians 4:30