“Grieve” is Beautiful

I learned something awesome last weekend.

I was prepping for my message on Eph 4:30 and “grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.”

I discovered that “grieve” is truly beautiful.

Consider Webster’s 1828 definition:

“GRIEVE, verb transitive [Latin gravo, from gravis.] 1. To give pain of mind to; to afflict; to wound the feelings. Nothing grieves a parent like the conduct of a profligate child. 2. To afflict; to inflict pain on.3. To make sorrowful; to excite regret in.”

“Grieve” is all about love.

This is a relational word. You can offend a king. You can disobey a boss. But you can only grieve someone who loves you.

You don’t grieve electricity. You don’t grieve AI. You don’t grieve car, although my car is in a continual state of despair but that’s another story.

You can only grieve someone who loves you.

This one word grieve already says volumes about the Holy Spirit. You can be made angry by someone you don’t know at a distance, but grieving requires closeness. An enemy may anger you, but that enemy will never grieve you. Only someone you love, someone you have opened your heart to and invested in, has the power to cause you grief.

Therefore, when the Holy Spirit is grieved by our conduct or bitter words, “grieve” reveals to us that He is emotionally vulnerable about you. He’s not some cold, clinical, divine energy out there. He’s a divine Person dwelling inside of you and He has hitched His joy to the way you live your life.

It’s just amazing, isn’t it, that He possesses all the infinite power of the Godhead, and yet, He’s emotionally vulnerable about you. He can be grieved by your conduct.

This also tells us that the Spirit is actively engaged in your life right now. You cannot grieve someone who is absent or doesn’t care. You cannot grieve someone who has walked away. The very possibility of grieving the Spirit assumes His active presence inside of you as well as His active engagement in your life and how you serve the Father.

He is present with you in the middle of everyday life and all its highs and lows.

This also means that the Spirit is astonishingly patient. Because the very Spirit we grieve is the Spirit who remains. The very Spirit pained by our failures is the Spirit who still seals us unto the day of redemption. He is grieved— yet He stays. He is wounded— yet He continues His work inside of us.