The indwelling of the Holy Spirit – What is it?

The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is God taking up permanent residence in the heart of those who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ as Savior. In the Old Testament, the Spirit would come intermittently upon the saints, empowering them for service but not necessarily remaining with them. The Spirit “rushed upon” Lehi (Judges 15:14) and “clothed” Amasai (1 Chronicles 12:18). The Spirit was with David and able to be removed from him (Psalm 51:11), and the Spirit “fell upon” Ezekiel and spoke to him (Ezekiel 11:5). The Spirit, who had once been with King Saul, “departed from” him, removing His influence and guidance from the king (1 Samuel 16:14).

It wasn’t until Pentecost that the Spirit began to indwell those who belong to God through Christ. Jesus predicted the coming of the Spirit who would live within His people, as well as the new role the Spirit of Truth would play in their lives. Prior to the resurrection and Pentecost, the Spirit was with the disciples and influenced them, but He did not yet indwell them, as Jesus explained to them: “he dwells with you and will be in you” (John 14:17, italics added). John 7:39 explains further: “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”

The apostle Paul reiterated the same truth about the Spirit’s indwelling: “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Because believers have been purchased for God by the blood of Christ, shed on the cross for our sins, our bodies become a living temple where the Spirit of God resides.

The image of the believer’s body being a temple is reminiscent of the Old Testament tabernacle, in which the Spirit of God lived. There, God’s presence would appear in a cloud and meet the high priest, who came once a year into the Holy of Holies. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest brought the blood of a slain animal and sprinkled it on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant. On this special day, God granted forgiveness to the priest and His people (Leviticus 16).

The Jewish temple in Jerusalem no longer exists. Now the believer in Christ has become the inner sanctum of God the Holy Spirit, as the believer has been sanctified and forgiven by the blood of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:7). In fact, Scripture also says that the believer is the dwelling place of all three Persons of the Trinity. Along with the Spirit, Jesus Christ is in us (Colossians 1:27), as is God the Father (1 John 4:15).

The purpose of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is many-faceted. First and foremost, the Spirit creates new life in believers (Titus 3:5), producing the same new birth Jesus spoke of in John 3:1–8. The Spirit confirms to us that this new birth is real and that we truly belong to God (Romans 8:15–17). He also imparts to believers spiritual gifts to be used to build up the body of Christ and glorify God (1 Corinthians 12:4–11). Further, as the author of Scripture through the writers He inspired (2 Timothy 3:16), the indwelling Spirit helps believers understand what He has written and how to apply it to daily life (1 Corinthians 2:12).

Other functions of the indwelling Spirit include interceding for believers in prayer (Romans 8:26), leading us in the ways of righteous living (Romans 8:14), producing His fruit in our lives (Galatians 5:22–23), and installing believers into the universal church of Christ, also called the baptism of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13).

One of the indwelling Spirit’s most encouraging functions is to seal believers for eternity by placing His own mark upon us. Doing so assures our arrival in the Lord’s presence when we die (Ephesians 1:13–14, 4:30). The Holy Spirit’s presence within us is the guarantee that we have been purchased by Christ and redeemed from our sins. We can never lose our position as a prized possession. Until we die, the Spirit remains within us, renewing and sanctifying us, comforting us in trials, and sustaining us in afflictions. With the indwelling Holy Spirit, we are never alone, never lost, and never without His power.

The Mystical Number 40

Why 40?

Throughout history, God has tested his servants by means of 40 to reassure them that despite the pain and distress, his caring hand never disappears. As said in Ps. 138:78, “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, You will revive me; You will stretch forth Your hand against the wrath of my enemies, and Your right hand will save me.”

In Hebrew, every letter has a numerical value (A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, and so forth). Forty is the total numerical value of the Hebrew letters:

YD YHWH

יד יהוה

5+6+5+10+4+10

“Hand of the Lord”

The number 40 is here to remind us, that even in the most difficult times of trial, the hand of God sustains us. When you can read the Bible in the original Hebrew, you have access to innumerable layers of meaning that are simply unavailable in the English translation. Now is the time to enroll in our online Biblical Hebrew course.

New Durham Bombshell: FBI Paid Russian Accused of Lying As a Confidential Informant Against Trump

by John Symank September 13, 2022

Special Prosecutor John Durham revealed in a bombshell revelation that Igor Danchenko, a Russian businessman and the primary source for the now-discredited Steele Dossier, was paid by the FBI to act as a confidential human source in the investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, despite it’s concerns that he was tied to Moscow’s intelligence community.

The unsealed motion revealed that Danchenko was paid by the FBI as a confidential human source for more than three years until the fall of 2020 when he was terminated for lying to agents.

Inno Gialuron

Danchenko is currently facing trial next month in federal court for five counts of lying to the bureau during that relationship. 

“In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI,” Durham’s unsealed court filing disclosed for the first time. “The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020. As alleged in further detail below, the defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews.”

The FBI fired former M16 agent Christopher Steele, who wrote the dossier funded by Hillary Clinton, as a human source in November 2016 for having unauthorized contact with the news media. This revelation means that they, only a few months later, hired Steele’s primary informer to work with the bureau, despite already having determined that some of Danchenko’s statements in the dossier were uncorroborated or exaggerated.

Additionally, Durham confirmed in the filing that the FBI was concerned about Danchenko’s ties to Russian intelligence ten years prior, and had opened a counterintelligence probe on him after they discovered that he was trying to buy classified information from the Obama administration.

“As has been publicly reported, the defendant was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011,” Durham wrote. “In late 2008, while the defendant was employed by a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C., the defendant engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.

“According to one employee (‘Employee-1’), the defendant believed that he (Employee-1) might be in a position to enter the incoming Obama administration and have access to classified information. During this exchange, the defendant informed Employee-1 that he had access to people who would be willing to pay money in exchange for classified information. Employee-1 passed this information to a U.S. government contact, and the information was subsequently passed to the FBI.

“Based on this information, the FBI initiated a ‘preliminary investigation’ into the defendant. The FBI converted its investigation into a ‘full investigation’ after learning that the defendant (1) had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects and (2) had previous contact with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.”

The FBI closed that counterintelligence probe in 2010, but only after it “incorrectly believed that the defendant had left the country,” Durham told the court.

“During his January 2017 interview with the FBI, the defendant initially denied having any contact with Russian intelligence or security services but later — as noted by the agents, contradicted himself and stated that he had contact with two individuals who he believed to be connected to those services,” Durham wrote.

The filing went on to ask the court for permission to use evidence in trial of other lies that Danchenko allegedly told the FBI, but are not charged as part of his indictment. Durham argued that the evidence would help show a pattern of deception, and how it led to false narratives in the Steele dossier and media. 

The special prosecutor hopes to show the jury evidence that Danchenko made “uncharged false statements to the FBI regarding his purported receipt of information reflecting Donald’s Trump’s alleged salacious sexual activity at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow,” the filing said, in reference to the claim that the former president consorted with prostitutes in the Russian capital. 

Prosecutors will provide evidence that Danchenko never received such information, and intend to introduce testimony that members of the hotel staff in Moscow never made any claims about Trump’s behavior, including those the Steele dossier attributed to them. 

“The Government has interviewed and expects to call at trial the then-general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, Bernd Kuhlen,” according to the filing, “a German citizen who does not speak Russian (and whom the Steele Reports describe as ‘Source E,’ a senior (western) member of staff at the hotel.)

“Mr. Kuhlen does not recall ever meeting or speaking with the defendant in June 2016, or at any time. Mr. Kuhlen also has denied (1) having knowledge of the Ritz-Carlton allegations at any time prior to their being reported in the media, (2) discussing such allegations with, or hearing them from, the defendant.” 

Former President Trump also posted about the bombshell news in a Truth Social Post, linking an article from JustTheNews on the subject. “This is a bombshell! The FBI was paying people to steal the 2020 Presidential Election from me. There has never been anything like this in the History of our Country—and then, we are supposed to trust them with documents that they illegally took from my home, Mar-a-Lago? They are not trustworthy.”

He continued, “Remember, the leadership of the FBI also tried to steal the 2016 Election from me for Crooked Hillary, but the Agents of the FBI revolted against Comey and his corrupt gang of thugs at the top.”

Lancet claims COVID may have leaked from U.S. lab

Investigators of pandemic origin faced resistance from NIH officials

By Art Moore September 15, 2022

In a report of its two-year investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet concluded it’s possible the virus originated in an American lab.

The investigators, led by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, argued that while independent teams have not probed American labs, it’s “plausible” the virus originated in the United States, the Telegraph of London reported.

But the Wuhan Institute of Virology is also a possible place of origin, and Sachs told the Telegraph the “question of a possible laboratory release mostly involves the question of US-China joint work that was underway on Sars-like viruses.”

The report noted the U.S. National Institutes of Health – which funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses – had “resisted disclosing details” to the investigators.

TRENDING: ‘Bombshell!’: FBI ‘paying people to steal 2020 presidential election’

The report is titled “The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Early in the pandemic, in February 2020, The Lancet infamously published a letter from 27 experts decrying “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid does not have a natural origin.” Last summer, as WND reported, Sachs disbanded a Lancet task force investigating the origin of the pandemic that had been led by Peter Daszak, the author of the letter, amid concerns it was biased towards the natural origin theory.

Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance received funding from the NIH to carry out gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As WND reported last September, the COVID-19 origins task force affiliated with The Lancet disbanded because of its connection to Daszak, who had chaired the panel before recusing himself from that role in June because of his clear conflict of interest. Daszak, in addition, was the sole U.S. representative on a World Health Organization panel that concluded the coronavirus pandemic had a natural origin.

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Sachs, in an interview with Vanity Fair in April, said there had been “a lack of transparency” in the investigation of the pandemic origin. He called for an “independent scientific investigation” of the possible role of the NIH, EcoHealth, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a partner laboratory at the University of North Carolina run by Dr. Ralph Baric.

In an interview with Current Affairs in August, Sachs said it’s known that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been trained by American scientists to use advanced bioengineering methodologies.

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“And in particular, we have scientists in North Carolina, Texas, and so forth who do this kind of research, believe in it, argue for it, and say that they don’t want any regulations on it and so on,” he said.

Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, said Sachs, “was the kind of marriage maker between the American scientists and the Chinese scientists.”

“That was the vehicle for funding from the U.S. government, especially from the National Institutes of Health, and especially from Tony Fauci’s unit, the NIAID,” he continued. “There were years of grants, there were grant proposals. We don’t know exactly what was done. But we have enough reason to know that we should be asking exactly what was done.”

Sachs said it’s known “definitively that from the beginning, NIH has been running from telling us what has been done.”

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“They’re not telling us the truth, that they had reason to fear from the start that this came out of a lab,” he told Current Affairs. “And that to this day, they have reason to suspect it, but they’re not talking.”

‘Outlandish conspiracy theory’
The Telegraph spoke with Dr. Peter Hotez, a member of the Lancet Commission and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, who opposed Sachs’ mention of U.S. labs in the report.

Hotez said there were “diverse views” on the investigative team, and he “pushed hard on removing” the U.S. labs in the report, calling it “a distraction.”

However, Hotez has criticized plans by House Republicans, if they regain the majority this fall, to investigate the lab-leak theory and the funding by NIH of gain-of-function research in cooperation with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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He said on Twitter it amounts to “a plan to undermine the fabric of science in America,” dismissing a possible lab leak as an “outlandish conspiracy” theory.

However, Hotez was the recipient of an NIH grant for the development of a SARS vaccine that would respond to any “accidental release from a laboratory” or a possible spillover from animals to humans.

Looking under the rug
Sachs raised eyebrows in June when he told a conference in Madrid he was “pretty convinced” that SARS-CoV-2 was derived from “U.S. lab biotechnology.”

While acknowledging “we don’t know for sure,” Sachs said “there’s enough evidence it should be looked into and it’s not being investigated – not in the U.S., not anywhere.”

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“I think for real reasons, [U.S. officials] don’t want to look under the rug too much,” Sachs said.

The Chinese government last year claimed COVID originated from an American military base in Maryland.

The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, reportedly told a European politician a lab accident at the Wuhan lab is the most likely explanation.