The Age of the Spirit: Living in God's Presence

If you've been here and gone through the story, you have started reading the Bible from the beginning, Genesis, and you're reading all the way through the historical part of it, that is the story of the Bible, the historical part, and now you're right at the end of it. You might think of the Scripture in terms of two different parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament, but really I want to focus on a different way of looking at the Bible. For the Bible is more than simply historical events, it's an encounter with God, and when you look at the Old Testament, you see the presence of God the Father in a powerful array of different ways. He's working in this world. As you might know, I have a, you can tell I have kind of a bronchitis deal, and so somebody's given me a, well, I don't know what it is, but something I'm supposed to use. If I get high, or do something real weird, don't get worried, I'll blame it on Kathy. Amen. That's right. If you look at the Old Testament, God is the primary actor. In the Old Testament, God's name is not mentioned, the name Yahweh, because the Hebrews didn't feel comfortable saying or writing God's name, so the word Lord appears in capital letters, and every time it appears, it's a reference to the personal name for God. Six thousand times in the Old Testament, God is referenced. He's the primary actor in the Old Testament. He personally talks to Moses, personally talks to David, but he doesn't talk to all the other people, just to those particular leaders, but he is the primary force in laying out the great plan that he has as to what's right and wrong. Now suddenly he begins to tell us that there in the future is going to be a Messiah who would come, and then he says there's going to be a time when the Spirit of God is poured out on all the people, telling us that something is going to change. And when you open the New Testament, beginning with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, suddenly the Father is not very prominent anymore. He's still there. The Spirit is still there, but now Jesus takes the focus. Over 960 times Jesus' name is mentioned in those four books. He is the center of attention. But he tells us in his own story toward the end of his life that there are changes coming. He talks about in John chapter 14, Jesus is getting ready to leave his disciples. And in chapter 14, verses 25 and 26, Jesus gives them a hint as the kind of transition that's going to take place for him and his people. I have spoken all this I have spoken while still with you, but the Counselor, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I've said to you. The Holy Spirit now is predicted to become a key ingredient in what God is doing in the world. And then in chapter 16 of the book of John, Jesus explains in a little bit more detail in verses starting with verse 12, I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. Jesus was saying, there are other things I would like to tell you, but I can't. You're not ready to receive it. His mission was unfinished, but it's going to be completed. But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own. He will speak only what he hears. He will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine, and that's why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you. Here Jesus is saying, my days on this earth are limited. That time will come when the Spirit of God will enter the world, and Jesus is off the scene. In the book of Acts, Jesus is in the first chapter, but beginning with the story in Acts all the way to the end of the history part of the Bible, the primary focus is on the Spirit of God. The Father takes sort of a back seat. The Son sort of takes a back seat. Now, their names are mentioned all the way through Acts and the rest of the books of the Bible, but they are mentioned not as key players but as part of the message of the sermon, that the Spirit is the powerful actor in all that takes place. What we now see is the third section of the Bible. It is the age of the Spirit. That's the age that you and I live in. The last part of the Bible is a guide as to how we ought to be able to live in this world and what God is at work doing in the world, because in this part of the Scripture it is indeed our story, the story of what God has done and what He is doing and how He is going to work. In the first part of this, the Holy Spirit takes hold of a man's life, Peter, who had been a devoted follower of Christ, but he was deeply embedded in the Jewish religion, and it was hard for him to see that non-Jews could ever be a part of any of this. The Holy Spirit takes a hold of his life and brings him to the place where he sees now that everyone is available to come to know God. He preaches to people who are not Jews and sees the Holy Spirit fill them and draw them into the kingdom. This was the man who was afraid to stand up and claim that he knew Christ and denied Him three times, but when the Spirit grabbed his heart, life, and mind, he stood before people and proclaimed the truth of God, and literally thousands of people turned in faith to Christ. We see in this event the power of the Spirit greater than even in the ministry of Jesus Himself in terms of the numbers of people. God has unleashed in this world the power of God's Spirit to come in the lives and the hearts of people. The Father could communicate with people, Jesus could talk with people, but the Spirit of God comes into our minds and into our hearts and becomes a part of us and transforms who we are. Whenever the story of Paul is brought into the picture, it's sort of a different turn that I would take. If I had been there and talked with Jesus about what he should do after he left this earth, I would have said, you know, you've got these twelve guys you've been training all this time. You should take each one of those and send them to different parts of the world to be missionaries and write their stories in the Bible and tell us what wonderful and powerful things they do, but you know he didn't do that. We don't know very much about what happened to the twelve followers of Jesus. We have stories about it, but nothing in the Scripture. The Bible just drops them, Peter, James, John, they just disappear from the picture. I think it's because they are not the heart of this New Testament story. You know what it is? It's the Spirit of God. What we find in this story from Acts on is what the Spirit of God does in the world and in the lives of people. If I were looking around in Jesus' day for the least likely person in all the world to become a great follower of his, I would have said Saul of Tarsus was that man. He was dedicated to destroy the followers of Christ. He hated them. He thought he was doing God a great favor if he were to kill the followers of Jesus. And he was passionate about it. He was determined to do it, but something happened in his life that changed everything. You know the story of him being on the road to Damascus and suddenly he was confronted with Jesus who spoke to him and now he knew this man Jesus who had lived and they said he died and was raised again was a lie, but he heard Jesus himself and he knew Jesus is alive. This is real. It's true. He was confronted with this. Jesus said to him, why have you been kicking against the prods the way you direct an animal is take a long stick with sharp and you poke it on the side and it moves over. He'd been trying to move Paul over. He'd been trying to turn him around, but every time he would prod him, he would just kick back at it, resist it until that one time when he heard the voice of a dead man now alive and he knew that this was something different. What happened to Saul in chapter nine of the book of Acts, verse 13 and Ananias, one of Paul, one of God's workers was totally must go to talk to Saul, Lord, and I answered, I've heard many reports about this man and all the harm he's done to your saints in Jerusalem and he's come here with authority from the chief priest to arrest all who are in your name. But the Lord said to Ananias, go. This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Then Ananias went to the house and entered it, placing his hands on Saul. He said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit. To be filled with the Holy Spirit is sort of a bad image sometimes. You think of a glass and you take some water and you pour in it until it's full, but when Paul is writing, he says one time, don't be drunk with wine, but instead be filled with the Spirit. He gives us an idea here of what filled with the Spirit means. If you're filled with alcohol, it controls your mind and your thinking and your physical actions, all your body, it's in control of you. It causes you to do things that you wouldn't otherwise do. So if you are filled with the Spirit, the Spirit causes you to do things that your physical or your human nature does not do. You do godly things. What happened to Paul was he was filled with the presence of God's Spirit to guide and lead him every day of his life. Now he was under control of the Spirit. The Spirit doesn't come on anybody, just everybody, but the Spirit's control comes to people that Jesus described as followers of his. He said, if you want to come after me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. For Paul it meant he had to say, I'm no longer going to do the things that I've been doing in the past. In the past I hated the followers of Christ, I can't do that anymore. In the past he was trying to make a career for himself as a part of the Jewish community. No longer was that possible for him. Take up his cross means that he had to do this at great cost to himself. The moment he became a follower of Christ, the followers of Christ did not trust him. He'd been killing them. His Jewish friends did not trust him. They wanted to kill him. Everyone wanted to kill him. He placed his life in great danger by doing exactly what God asked him to do. And he began to learn about Jesus. What is it that Jesus wants me to do? And to shape his life after the character and the nature of Christ himself. And it's this kind of person who gets filled with the Spirit. A person who's devoted themselves completely to the presence and power of God. And this was Paul's life. What we see in Paul's life is over and over again how the Spirit of God moves in his life. How it changes him. How it causes him to be such a powerful influence to the people around him. And as you read his story, everywhere he goes, it's not comfortable, he goes to the city of Antioch. And while they're there praying and fasting, the Holy Spirit says, I want you to set aside Barnabas and Saul to go on a missionary journey for me. Nobody had ever been on a missionary journey before. Brand new thing. So Barnabas and Saul start out on a mission trip. They don't know exactly where they're going or where they'll end up. They just go from one town to another as the Spirit of God guided them. And begin to tell the story of who Jesus was. Remarkable things take place. They go into towns and begin to preach. People get mad, run them out, they go to another town, great responses are found. Sometimes people hate them. Sometimes people embrace them. But through all of that, there is one consistent thing. The Holy Spirit of God is leading them. He's telling them what to do. There was one occasion in Paul's life in which he was ready to go and preach in a community and it says the Spirit of God stopped him, told him, this is not what you should do. The Spirit of God opened opportunities and closed opportunities. But one single thing was consistent. He always listened to the Spirit of God. Paul's missionary journeys were over. He was ready to end his life. He had a call that he was to go to Jerusalem. Everybody around him didn't want him to go to Jerusalem. Stories in chapter 20 of the book of Acts. People warned him that only danger was going to find him in Jerusalem. Chapter 20, verse 22 and 24, it describes something about what happened inside of Paul that made him see this as God's will for him. And now, compelled by the Spirit, see that phrase, compelled by the Spirit, I'm going to Jerusalem. Not knowing what will happen to me there, I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardship are facing me. However, I consider my life worth nothing to me. If only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord has given me, the task of testifying to the gospel of God's grace. Paul was told he needed to go to Jerusalem. People warned him that there he would die, and he believed it. But he knew that the Spirit had told him that's what he had to do. How hard is it for you to do something that you know is going to bring disaster? How hard would it be to do something that you know is going to bring death? But he was so devoted to obedience to God that he did what the Spirit told him. You'll notice, though, the Spirit said, this is what you must do, but I'll tell you what's going to happen to you. It's going to be bad, but face it anyway. This is God's job for you. He goes to Jerusalem, put in jail. Here in this story, the Spirit is hardly ever mentioned in Paul's story from now to the end. He goes to jail. He's shipped off to Rome. He gets on a boat. The Holy Spirit warns him, doesn't say the Spirit, but he knows now this is going to be a dangerous journey. He tells that to the captain. How does he know this? He's not a sailor, never been around that sort of thing. What God promises is, when you make a promise to follow me, I will guide you, I will provide for you, I will protect you, and I will make your life a blessing to others. Those are the four promises God's covenant gives us. Paul on the boat was told, guided, this ship is headed for trouble. He told everybody, don't make this trip. They didn't listen. They got out in the ocean, looked like they were all going to die. An angel comes, not the Spirit, but an angel comes. I think that it's because if he went down and said to the captain, the Holy Spirit told me, they would say, what's that? But if they said, an angel told me, they would say, I get it. They listened to Paul, but the Holy Spirit was guiding him in all of these circumstances. The ship was wrecked, got on ground, a snake bit him in the hand that was poisonous. The Spirit protected him. What we see in Paul's life is the life that God gives to us. You know why I think Paul was chosen to do this? He wanted us to know that there's not a human being in the world who's a worse enemy of God's than Paul's. But he can take that life and turn it around and make it a powerful force in the world if you have one human being who is covered by the Spirit of God. They are unstoppable. So you can't say to God, now, God, I can't be useful to you because I'm too young or I'm too old or I'm not educated or I've lived a bad life or I've done a lot of bad things. You look at Saul's life, you never see anyone as dedicated an enemy of God as this man. So it eliminates any excuse for you to say, I can't serve God because of my past or because of what I've done. He wants us to see that God can take an individual, even his worst enemy, and if he will devote his life to him, he will transform his nature and character and purpose and life. And in every step of his life, he will tell you what you need to know, what you need to do, what you shouldn't do. He will rescue you from the dangers that are there. For when the Spirit controls your life, God is living inside of you. David didn't have that, Abraham didn't have that, none of the disciples listening to Jesus had it until the day the Spirit came. And they all became new people. The story of Saul's life and Paul's life is really not the story of his life. We don't know very much about his birth. We don't even know very much about the end of his life. We have to get that outside the Bible if we get anything. And the reason is because it's not about him. The key player in the New Testament from Acts on is the Holy Spirit of God. This great presence of God that can come and live in human beings, you. If the Spirit of God can come into his worst enemy and transform him, he can come into any of us. And if there is a person willing to give their lives to God and say, I will deny myself, I'll take up my cross, I'll follow you, no matter what, God can make your life a powerful tool and transform you into the person he wants you to be. We see in the story of Paul, your story, what he wants you to be. He wants your life when it's over for people to look at it and say, a man who blessed the world. Paul was a man transformed and changed because of all that took place in his life. Chapter 20 of Acts, verse 28, Paul in giving his farewell address to his leaders of the church in Ephesus, guard yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he brought with his own blood. Paul is passing on to us the church. You leaders in the church, be filled with the Holy Spirit and do your job of taking care of the people I've trusted to your hands, pastors, Sunday school teachers, leaders in the church. All of them were charged by Paul. The Spirit of God that has made me who I am will make you everything God wants you to be. The great secret of the power of the gospel is found in the Spirit of God. Here's what he does. He convinces you you're wrong. He forgives you of your sin. He transforms your nature, makes you live a different kind of life than you've ever lived before with new values and new purpose and new passion. He guides you in all the choices that you need to make. He provides the needs of your life. He protects you from the things that will destroy you, and he makes your life a blessing to the people around you. You can never do that by yourself, but if you will say to Jesus, I give myself to you. I put aside my own ambitions and purposes, and now I want to live for the purpose you have me in this world. If you're willing to start doing that, and you keep doing it regardless of what the apparent cost is to you, whether it costs you your job, whether it costs you your friends, whether it costs you your money, whatever the cost is, you always say, I'll do it regardless of what it costs, and if you then begin to let Jesus Christ shape your life, show you what's wrong with you, show you what you ought to be doing, and you follow him passionately, you will find the Spirit of God poured out on you. The Spirit of God is never given to people who are not devoted to Christ. If you dislike God, and you want to be going to heaven, you're not going to get the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes on those people who say, my life is poured out for you. You may have made a prayer to God sometime in your life, but you still may not have surrendered yourself to him. If you're trying to live this Christian life without this devotion to him, it will simply be routine. The power of God will not be there. He wants to face your stubborn resistance to him. This is what I want you to do. Are you willing to do whatever I ask you? With that, then the Spirit comes, and the life you see in Saul will be yours. Could you bow your heads, please, for a moment? I want to ask you if you know something that God has been telling you to do, but you've not been willing to do it. Deny yourself is the first step. If you've not been willing to do it because you're afraid of what it will do to you, how it will change your life, the cost it might bring, the Spirit will never come to your life if you're not willing to take up your cross. If you're not willing to listen to God, read the Bible, let it change your attitude, behavior, and lifestyle, the Spirit will never come. But if you've trusted him with your life in every kind of fashion, then God's Spirit will enter your life, and you will then live, not by your own ability and will, but by the power and wisdom of God himself living inside of you, and he will teach you the things of Jesus that even his disciples did not learn. This is the age of the Spirit. It's the Spirit that brings life, power, strength, and victory, and God wants you to have it. What he asks is that you say to him, here is my life. The moment the piano's going to play, I want you to think about your life with God. What has he told you you ought to do? And you've said no. Your no stands in the way of the power of the Spirit working inside of you. I want to urge you today, say yes. He may ask you to commit your life to him today. He may ask you to say I'm ready now to become a follower of Christ and display to the whole world by baptism my surrender to him in this new life that I have. He may ask you to be a part of this church. He may ask you a job that you've been saying no to that you should say yes to. Do not resist the Spirit of God, for the life that God wants you to have can only come when you say yes, Lord. So if you know what God wants you to do in these moments, we want you to say yes to him. If you want to share your commitment, you just come and share it with myself or Kathy. I need to stand up here. You probably wouldn't see you anyway. Chris Traylor comes today. Chris, what's happened to you this last week? We went to a youth Christian's weekend there in Brance, Missouri, Silver Dollar City, and just Friday night we had a concert to attend that really the Holy Spirit just got a hold of me then and just took a hold of me and I knew exactly what I needed to do, give myself to Christ, accept him into my heart, make him my personal Savior, and I'm announcing that to you guys today. I mean, I did it last weekend, but yet I'd like to become a part of the church, become a member, and just do everything that I can. Yeah, you didn't grow up in church, did you? No, I did not. It wasn't a part of your lifestyle. You've been coming for a while, and God has suddenly brought you along to the place where you see the need that God has in your life, and you've come to make that promise to him. What we know that means is that you start reading the Bible, listening to God direct your life, and allow him to put you in places of service and ministry to him, and we'll help you step-by-step through all of this. We'll plan a time of baptism for you, and then we'll help you grow in your faith and trust in following Christ. We think that a person that comes and says, I've given my life to Christ, has done what God wants them to do. We are a community of faith, and we have a responsibility to a person like this, and what we ask is that you promise as a congregation that you will love Chris, that you'll encourage him and support him in what he does, that you'll make sure that this is a place when he goes to Sunday school, the Bible is taught, when he comes to church, the Bible is preached, that you as a people in the church, when you see him out in the community, that he sees your life as people who are following Christ and living in obedience to him, that you accept him as a Christian brother, and that you support him and encourage him. If you can make that promise to him, would you hold your hand up just a moment? As you promised to become a part of us, we promise to become a part of your life too. Thank you. Courtney, would you come and stand with Chris just a minute? Courtney and Chris are going to be married soon, so we'll have both of you to stand and greet people on the outside. Would you stand for a moment of prayer? We're thankful for you, Lord, the ruler of the universe and creator of all. We're so appreciative of Jesus who came and lived this life of sacrifice and gave himself for us, but you have given us your spirit, the spirit that resides inside of us that says, this is the day I want you to give me your life, who says this is the way you should act, who says this is what you did wrong. We're so thankful for the abiding presence of your spirit, the guidance you give us, the power you provide us. We live dependent upon that, and we give you thanks for it. We ask for your blessings for Chris, help him to grow to be the person you want him to be and the man of God you want him to be. In the name of Christ, we ask this, amen. So if you're a reader or an actor for the Easter celebration tonight at 6 o'clock, come. If you haven't been asked to do something and you want to do something, come at 6 o'clock tonight. I'll put you to work for sure. And then we have choir practice at 730. We're going to close as you guys exit and are dismissed. We'll sing soldiers of Christ arise. Soldiers of Christ arise and put your armor on.