Now I've learnt something very simple. The Bible tells us that honour and gratitude give you access to God. Dishonour and ingratitude cause his presence to move away, and you go into darkness, Romans 1:21. So that makes it very simple, and it works in every area of life. If I will honour people and appreciate them, I will gain access to them. If I dishonour or disrespect them, and show ingratitude and take them for granted, then they will move away from me. This is a powerful principle in life, and so I guarantee if people are moving away in some place, there's disrespect and lack of appreciation. Restore that back into the relationship and it'll begin to shift again.
So applying that to our relationship with God, if I will begin to just talk with Him: thank you Holy Spirit. I thank you you're living in me. Thank you, today you are joined in me. You are empowering me. I yield and surrender to you Holy Spirit. I so appreciate you. Come and speak to me today. Come and talk with me, come and fellowship with me. Come and show me the ways of Jesus, show me things from the word of God - and you begin to talk, and not talk loud and strong, but talk gently. Talk consciously, like you're addressing a person, like you're just someone that close to you, and you're talking with them as a real person. See most believers, most Christians forget the spirit of God is living inside them. We think and live out of our experiences of being alone and lonely, instead of actually living out of the new reality: I am never alone, ever again.
God is in me and with me, so you begin to meditate on that. You begin to think. You can do that even in a car, begin to pray in tongues; one minute praying in tongues, and then beginning to talk and say: thank you Holy Spirit. I feel your presence here. Here's the next thing, the fourth thing you can do, is very, very simply, just practice yielding to Him, and that's quite simple to do. Holy Spirit, I just yield every part of me today. I yield my spirit, each and every part of my spirit. I yield and surrender to you today - and then go through each part of your body, and begin to yield it to Him. Learn to let go control.
So here's the last one; practice dealing with issues in your life very quickly. In Ephesians 4:30, it tells us not to grieve the Holy Spirit; so you can actually grieve the Holy Spirit. 1 Thessalonians 5:18, don't quench the Holy Spirit. So the activity of the Holy Spirit in your life, you can hurt Him or grieve Him, and make Him terribly heartbroken about you by certain things. The kinds of things that make Him heartbroken are usually attitudes to people; so in Ephesians 4 it tells us: don't let there be bitterness. Don't let there be anger. Don't let there be resentment. Don't let there be these things in your heart, because they will grieve the kindness and goodness of the Holy Spirit. So when you start to deal with issues of your heart, very quickly, anything comes into your heart, repent of it very quickly. You help cultivate the atmosphere of being filled with the spirit.
Don't quench the spirit. To quench the spirit means to act in ways that resist His work in your life, so let me tell you one thing that was just - trying to be cool is quenching the Holy Ghost. You want to be cool? You want to be cool with the Holy Ghost? Very simple, because when the Holy Ghost fills you, He deals with the issue of pride; and we want to look good in the face of people. So by osmosis, if you want to be cool and want to look good in the face of people, the chances are you won't be looking too good before God. So instead of looking cool, learn to let go and say: God, I just want all that you have for me. So we can quench the Holy Spirit by looking cool. We can quench the Holy Spirit by control, consciously trying to control our life and run our life, and just have God as an add on God. He's not an add-on God, so don't treat Him with disrespect.