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All the way through our lives, we have learned from others. Some people taught us this and some taught us that. Some people taught us just one thing that was of limited value, like how to dial an old-style dial telephone – of limited value today. Others taught us something more broadly useful like how to read or helped us with our multiplication tables. Some brave fool sat down beside us and taught us to drive! But for many of us, we’ve had a few, very few people through our lives to whom we could turn for almost any question and say, “How do I do this?” We call these people “mentors”, and they have an unusual impact upon our lives. Who was your mentor? Was it a teacher, an older friend, an uncle or aunt, a grandmother or grandfather, your dad or your mom? Was it a friend at work or a neighbor?
We came to rely upon our mentor. Those regular conversations taught us a lot about the “how to’s” of life – how to bake cakes, how to grill steaks, how to paint a wall, how to repair a car, how to grow a garden, how to be successful at your job, how to get connected to email. Our mentor was always there. You may have a mentor today and enjoy that sort of relationship, a real person, not a YouTube video, not a book, not a help screen, not a Google’d article. A real person. Someone who would pick up the phone or be ready to talk when you have a question.
Some of you may be like me. You’ve lived long enough that you’ve become the mentor – your mentor has retired, or moved to Florida, or moved to Heaven. And now you mentor other people, mostly younger than yourself. You pass on that information that is so simple, but difficult to learn the first time, like making sure meringue has peaks, like tightening lug nuts until they squeak, like approaching a new dog with your fingers pointed down and slightly curled while letting the dog sniff the back of your hand, or like never drawing to an inside straight in poker. You are now the mentor – and you are mostly on your own – and sometimes you miss having that mentor, don’t you? Like all of us, you still have questions about living life, right?
Turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor!” “I still need a mentor!”
Revelation 21:10, 22:1-22:5; Acts 16:9-15; John 14:23-29 Audio Gospel
As the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry rolled around, He recognized that He had been teaching His disciples a lot. There were the twelve core disciples, but there were also the 120 or so people that formed His group of regular followers, both men and women. What would happen to all these men and women when He returned to Heaven? There was a plan that had been waiting since the Beginning, a plan for continued teaching that would help the people through all those days when questions would come up that Jesus hadn’t spoken about – or the disciples had been distracted when Jesus HAD spoken about those things.
You see, if Jesus had stayed on earth, there would have been a problem. All the disciples would have stayed with Jesus, listening to Him, day after day as they grew older and older. Nobody would have been intentionally spreading the word about God. How do we know this?
Jesus once tried sending out 70 disciples to spread the word to the small villages of Judah that The Kingdom of God was coming. Those disciples went out – and then, a couple days later, they came right back to Jesus. For being near Jesus was more comfortable than answering difficult questions in those villages with people who were often a bit antagonistic, upset, angry or “had issues”. Jesus’ mere physical presence was impeding the ministry.
So the night of His last Passover meal, the Seder meal that became known as The Last Supper, Jesus spoke at length to His disciples, probably the Twelve and a handful more.
He told them in John 14:25: “I have spoken these things to you while I remain with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit—the Father will send Him in My name—will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.”
In our world today in 21st Century America, many people speak of God. Our young people are very spiritual. There is great discussion of God – millions of people who never attend church, who never open a Bible speak of God and are very quick to share their opinions of God, debating what type of God would be acceptable to them. Many of these people are Christian – but many are not, for they never speak of Christ, of Jesus. The proper term for a person who believes in the existence of a god is a “theist”. A theist is a person who believes in a god. An “a-theist” is a person who does not believe in a god. And in today’s America, about 1 person in 10 is an a-theist, while about 9 out of 10 are theists, people who believe in a god.
One of those nine theists is either Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu, religions with views of God which often radically different from the Christian God, who is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
But only 8 of those theists even claim to be Christian. But if we take a bit more stringent definition, we can find that only about 4 of those theists actually have any understanding of Jesus Christ as God. The other 4 theists who claim to be Christians have their own views of God which more or less ignore Jesus Christ, so let’s just talk about those Christians who understand Jesus Christ to be truly the Son of God, part of God in a complicated way. Let me be clear – a Christian talks about Christ and worships Christ as well as God the Father. A wannabe Christian, person is only thinks they are Christian almost never talks about Christ – they are focused solely on God. If you have a friend or relative or neighbor like this, speak with them about how Jesus’ death and resurrection make Him worthy of worship. Help them move from theist to Christian by teaching them about Jesus.
So about 40 percent of Americans actually worship Jesus Christ as God. About 10 to 15% of Americans are true Christians who are unable or unwilling to come to church regularly because of health, work, or being hurt by their most recent encounters with the church. That leaves us with what the surveys say is between 25 and 30 percent of Americans attending church each week, which is also about what we see here in this county.
By the way, children who attend church at least weekly have average GPA’s of 3.0. Kids who attend at least monthly have GPA’s of 2.9. Kids who attend church less than monthly have GPA’s of 2.7. And those who never attend church have GPA’s of 2.6. Church attendance helps our children.
In the church-going Christian community, we talk a lot more about Jesus than the wannabe Christians do. Almost every week, we have Gospel readings and sermons that talk about the deeds and teachings and sayings of Jesus Christ. The Christian community talks a lot about Jesus, who is God the Son, and we talk a lot about God the Father, the Creator of the Universe.
But we church-going Christians also have a blind spot. We don’t speak much about God the Holy Spirit. In most of our churches, we leave the Holy Spirit on the front doorstep, mentioning the Spirit occasionally, but often getting mixed up about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has almost become a dividing line between churches and denominations. But that is largely because of our general ignorance about the Spirit.
At the one extreme, we have the churches which forbid the action of the Holy Spirit. We once attended a church that maintained that the Holy Spirit had stopped acting when the Book of Acts closed, that the original Apostles had to be present for the Holy Spirit to act – and only the original Apostles were qualified. Needless to say, that church – and others like it that we have seen over the years – are cold, rational, intellectual….and feel dead.
At the other end are the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches that believe that you are only saved if you speak in tongues or are slain by the Spirit. These churches can be frightening to the average person who attends a service because of the chaotic worship and the irrational, highly emotional events that are going on.
In our modern United Methodist churches, we seem to often equate the presence of the Holy Spirit with a lack of planning until the service begins, a lack of order, a sermon delivered with shouting, arms swinging, men running on the tops of pews and other theatrics, a sermon that makes us weep or shout with joy. We measure the presence of the Holy Spirit by the buckets of tears - sad or joyful - that we weep.
As the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry rolled around, He recognized that He had been teaching His disciples a lot. There were the twelve core disciples, but there were also the 120 or so people that formed His group of regular followers, both men and women. What would happen to all these men and women when He returned to Heaven? There was a plan that had been waiting since the Beginning, a plan for continued teaching that would help the people through all those days when questions would come up that Jesus hadn’t spoken about – or the disciples had been distracted when Jesus HAD spoken about those things.
You see, if Jesus had stayed on earth, there would have been a problem. All the disciples would have stayed with Jesus, listening to Him, day after day as they grew older and older. Nobody would have been intentionally spreading the word about God. How do we know this?
Jesus once tried sending out 70 disciples to spread the word to the small villages of Judah that The Kingdom of God was coming. Those disciples went out – and then, a couple days later, they came right back to Jesus. For being near Jesus was more comfortable than answering difficult questions in those villages with people who were often a bit antagonistic, upset, angry or “had issues”. Jesus’ mere physical presence was impeding the ministry.
So the night of His last Passover meal, the Seder meal that became known as The Last Supper, Jesus spoke at length to His disciples, probably the Twelve and a handful more.
He told them in John 14:25: “I have spoken these things to you while I remain with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit—the Father will send Him in My name—will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.”
In our world today in 21st Century America, many people speak of God. Our young people are very spiritual. There is great discussion of God – millions of people who never attend church, who never open a Bible speak of God and are very quick to share their opinions of God, debating what type of God would be acceptable to them. Many of these people are Christian – but many are not, for they never speak of Christ, of Jesus. The proper term for a person who believes in the existence of a god is a “theist”. A theist is a person who believes in a god. An “a-theist” is a person who does not believe in a god. And in today’s America, about 1 person in 10 is an a-theist, while about 9 out of 10 are theists, people who believe in a god.
One of those nine theists is either Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu, religions with views of God which often radically different from the Christian God, who is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
But only 8 of those theists even claim to be Christian. But if we take a bit more stringent definition, we can find that only about 4 of those theists actually have any understanding of Jesus Christ as God. The other 4 theists who claim to be Christians have their own views of God which more or less ignore Jesus Christ, so let’s just talk about those Christians who understand Jesus Christ to be truly the Son of God, part of God in a complicated way. Let me be clear – a Christian talks about Christ and worships Christ as well as God the Father. A wannabe Christian, person is only thinks they are Christian almost never talks about Christ – they are focused solely on God. If you have a friend or relative or neighbor like this, speak with them about how Jesus’ death and resurrection make Him worthy of worship. Help them move from theist to Christian by teaching them about Jesus.
So about 40 percent of Americans actually worship Jesus Christ as God. About 10 to 15% of Americans are true Christians who are unable or unwilling to come to church regularly because of health, work, or being hurt by their most recent encounters with the church. That leaves us with what the surveys say is between 25 and 30 percent of Americans attending church each week, which is also about what we see here in this county.
By the way, children who attend church at least weekly have average GPA’s of 3.0. Kids who attend at least monthly have GPA’s of 2.9. Kids who attend church less than monthly have GPA’s of 2.7. And those who never attend church have GPA’s of 2.6. Church attendance helps our children.
In the church-going Christian community, we talk a lot more about Jesus than the wannabe Christians do. Almost every week, we have Gospel readings and sermons that talk about the deeds and teachings and sayings of Jesus Christ. The Christian community talks a lot about Jesus, who is God the Son, and we talk a lot about God the Father, the Creator of the Universe.
But we church-going Christians also have a blind spot. We don’t speak much about God the Holy Spirit. In most of our churches, we leave the Holy Spirit on the front doorstep, mentioning the Spirit occasionally, but often getting mixed up about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has almost become a dividing line between churches and denominations. But that is largely because of our general ignorance about the Spirit.
At the one extreme, we have the churches which forbid the action of the Holy Spirit. We once attended a church that maintained that the Holy Spirit had stopped acting when the Book of Acts closed, that the original Apostles had to be present for the Holy Spirit to act – and only the original Apostles were qualified. Needless to say, that church – and others like it that we have seen over the years – are cold, rational, intellectual….and feel dead.
At the other end are the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches that believe that you are only saved if you speak in tongues or are slain by the Spirit. These churches can be frightening to the average person who attends a service because of the chaotic worship and the irrational, highly emotional events that are going on.
In our modern United Methodist churches, we seem to often equate the presence of the Holy Spirit with a lack of planning until the service begins, a lack of order, a sermon delivered with shouting, arms swinging, men running on the tops of pews and other theatrics, a sermon that makes us weep or shout with joy. We measure the presence of the Holy Spirit by the buckets of tears - sad or joyful - that we weep.
Yet the highly planned, well written sermons of Jonathan Edwards, delivered by him in almost a monotone, boring reading, completely without any shouting, had people weeping and crying and coming to the altar in Connecticut in colonial days – in fact, it was these revivals of Edwards that first drew John Wesley’s attention to the possibilities of an English revival, the revival that came to be known as the Methodist Revival. For, you see, both Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley wrote out their sermons carefully under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, praying deeply before and during their writing, so the words became so powerful no extra theatrics were needed. You see, the Holy Spirit can act - and does act - in the quiet of a pastor's study as well as in the sanctuary on Sunday morning.
So let’s try to understand today a bit more about the Holy Spirit as discussed in the Bible and how the Holy Spirit comes into the church.
Biblically speaking – and generally speaking, when the pastor baptizes you, you receive the Holy Spirit. The water is applied by sprinkling, pouring, or dunking you in the creek, the pastor lays hands upon you, and prays a prayer which asks the Holy Spirit to come into you. We Methodist believe that all baptized believers receive the Holy Spirit at this point.
However, there are some biblical cases where the Spirit came upon people before their baptism, such as the case we mentioned last week when Peter visited the Roman Cornelius’ household – see Acts Chapter 10. Peter had just begun to speak about Jesus when the Holy Spirit came upon the household, when all the members of the household began to praise Jesus and celebrate Him. Peter used this as evidence that God wanted even Gentile pagan Romans baptized, so he baptized the entire household at that time.
As we look through the Bible, the Holy Spirit is usually discussed in one of two ways. “The Holy Spirit came upon so-and-so,” and then so-and-so did something miraculous, or “So-and-so was filled with the Holy Spirit”.
What do we mean? In the first case, we can go back to I Samuel 10 for a good example, where the Holy Spirit came upon Saul, the man whom Samuel had just anointed with oil to be the first king of Israel. Saul, who a day earlier had been minding his own business, looking for his donkey, begins to prophesy with a group of prophets.
Now we often look at prophesying as meaning “predicting the future”, and it can mean that, but the root meaning is broader. It simply means “speaking on behalf of God”. In this context, apparently Saul was taken control of by God’s Holy Spirit, and he began to speak on behalf of God in a group of prophets.
A similar thing happened to the greater group of apostles and disciples on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit came upon them and they all began praising God in various languages. Furthermore, those languages were not languages they necessarily understood, but they were languages which were understood by the people who heard them. It was as if Debbie began to praise God in Japanese, just as a person from Japan entered our hall here, while Carl spoke a message in Russian to the guy from Moscow. Something similar, without the mention of the different languages, apparently happened when Peter began preaching at Cornelius’ house. People began praising God – people who had no good former knowledge of God or Christ.
In the other context, certain people are talked about as “full of the Holy Spirit”, as in Acts 6, where Stephen is described as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit”. In this context the daily actions – the conversation and the signs and wonders that Stephen shows are both evidence of and the result of the Holy Spirit which fills Stephen. So how might the Holy Spirit work in other ways?
First of all, it is the consensus of most Christian theologians that the Bible, and in particular, the New Testament was written by men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit. Even the word “inspired” refers to the air which is breathed into the person, and, as we have discussed before, in the original Greek and Hebrew languages, the same word is translated as “spirit”, as “wind”, and as “breath”. So inspired literally means “in spirited” – you can even see it in the spelling of the word. So we have this precedent that we know certain documents can be inspired by the Holy Spirit, guided in their creation by the gentle urging of the Holy Spirit.
Why is this important?
It is important because it tells us the Holy Spirit is not just the cause of immediate, spontaneous actions such as a spontaneous prayer or an unscripted sermon, but the Holy Spirit can plan things centuries in advance. How many times has Holy Scripture which was inspired by the Holy Spirit tugged at your emotions and transformed you?
So theologians maintain that the Holy Spirit can work through Scripture, but also in the writing of prayers which are said decades or even centuries later, in the very recommendation of the appropriate order of scriptures to choose, such as the order of scriptures in the Lectionary from which many pastors, including myself, often choose the readings, and in a sermon written days or even weeks ahead of time.
I’ve spoken to several of you at different times and told you after some question or discussion, “I want to make sure you understand that I’ve already written my sermon for this weekend, it will deal directly with your problem or your question.” And this is true. I might have a sermon written on Tuesday and then on Sunday it looks like I had a secret camera recording your life on Friday or Saturday because the sermon is so directly attuned to what is going on in your life. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. And not just with sermon’s I’ve delivered, but I’ve been on the receiving end of this, most notably with a pastor I know who actually wrote his sermons months in advance because he liked to work in batches. In a couple memorable weeks just before I accepted Christ, it was as if Pastor Doug MacIntosh had a bug in our bedroom as we were getting ready for church Sunday morning.
So let’s try to understand today a bit more about the Holy Spirit as discussed in the Bible and how the Holy Spirit comes into the church.
Biblically speaking – and generally speaking, when the pastor baptizes you, you receive the Holy Spirit. The water is applied by sprinkling, pouring, or dunking you in the creek, the pastor lays hands upon you, and prays a prayer which asks the Holy Spirit to come into you. We Methodist believe that all baptized believers receive the Holy Spirit at this point.
However, there are some biblical cases where the Spirit came upon people before their baptism, such as the case we mentioned last week when Peter visited the Roman Cornelius’ household – see Acts Chapter 10. Peter had just begun to speak about Jesus when the Holy Spirit came upon the household, when all the members of the household began to praise Jesus and celebrate Him. Peter used this as evidence that God wanted even Gentile pagan Romans baptized, so he baptized the entire household at that time.
As we look through the Bible, the Holy Spirit is usually discussed in one of two ways. “The Holy Spirit came upon so-and-so,” and then so-and-so did something miraculous, or “So-and-so was filled with the Holy Spirit”.
What do we mean? In the first case, we can go back to I Samuel 10 for a good example, where the Holy Spirit came upon Saul, the man whom Samuel had just anointed with oil to be the first king of Israel. Saul, who a day earlier had been minding his own business, looking for his donkey, begins to prophesy with a group of prophets.
Now we often look at prophesying as meaning “predicting the future”, and it can mean that, but the root meaning is broader. It simply means “speaking on behalf of God”. In this context, apparently Saul was taken control of by God’s Holy Spirit, and he began to speak on behalf of God in a group of prophets.
A similar thing happened to the greater group of apostles and disciples on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit came upon them and they all began praising God in various languages. Furthermore, those languages were not languages they necessarily understood, but they were languages which were understood by the people who heard them. It was as if Debbie began to praise God in Japanese, just as a person from Japan entered our hall here, while Carl spoke a message in Russian to the guy from Moscow. Something similar, without the mention of the different languages, apparently happened when Peter began preaching at Cornelius’ house. People began praising God – people who had no good former knowledge of God or Christ.
In the other context, certain people are talked about as “full of the Holy Spirit”, as in Acts 6, where Stephen is described as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit”. In this context the daily actions – the conversation and the signs and wonders that Stephen shows are both evidence of and the result of the Holy Spirit which fills Stephen. So how might the Holy Spirit work in other ways?
First of all, it is the consensus of most Christian theologians that the Bible, and in particular, the New Testament was written by men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit. Even the word “inspired” refers to the air which is breathed into the person, and, as we have discussed before, in the original Greek and Hebrew languages, the same word is translated as “spirit”, as “wind”, and as “breath”. So inspired literally means “in spirited” – you can even see it in the spelling of the word. So we have this precedent that we know certain documents can be inspired by the Holy Spirit, guided in their creation by the gentle urging of the Holy Spirit.
Why is this important?
It is important because it tells us the Holy Spirit is not just the cause of immediate, spontaneous actions such as a spontaneous prayer or an unscripted sermon, but the Holy Spirit can plan things centuries in advance. How many times has Holy Scripture which was inspired by the Holy Spirit tugged at your emotions and transformed you?
So theologians maintain that the Holy Spirit can work through Scripture, but also in the writing of prayers which are said decades or even centuries later, in the very recommendation of the appropriate order of scriptures to choose, such as the order of scriptures in the Lectionary from which many pastors, including myself, often choose the readings, and in a sermon written days or even weeks ahead of time.
I’ve spoken to several of you at different times and told you after some question or discussion, “I want to make sure you understand that I’ve already written my sermon for this weekend, it will deal directly with your problem or your question.” And this is true. I might have a sermon written on Tuesday and then on Sunday it looks like I had a secret camera recording your life on Friday or Saturday because the sermon is so directly attuned to what is going on in your life. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. And not just with sermon’s I’ve delivered, but I’ve been on the receiving end of this, most notably with a pastor I know who actually wrote his sermons months in advance because he liked to work in batches. In a couple memorable weeks just before I accepted Christ, it was as if Pastor Doug MacIntosh had a bug in our bedroom as we were getting ready for church Sunday morning.
I remember speaking to Saundra: "You need to go to church today. It's like our family is painting a mural, each one painting a portion of it, and you're the master painter. When you miss church, things go wrong in the painting of our family mural."
We drove to church. In the middle of his sermon, Pastor Doug said, "Consider a large mural. There is a master painter who is guiding the painting while many other painters paint small portions of it."
And I’ve seen it with Sunday school lessons I’ve taught and Saundra taught back before we were pastors – we would independently choose what to teach our classes and then after Sunday school, in the main service Pastor Steve would preach on the exact same subject.
The defining mark of the Holy Spirit is not when a sermon is changed at the last minute. The defining mark of the Holy Spirit is when truth is taught and the Spirit sets up a situation where, if you are willing, you can be transformed by that Truth. Remember what Jesus said:
But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit—the Father will send Him in My name—will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.
Sometimes, the most important part of worship preparation, I have found, is in the selection of a hymn from four hundred years ago or from 1930 or that first appeared last year, the selection of a prayer that was written decades ago or from scratch, the choice to read from the Psalm instead of from Romans, or yes, the one-line throw-away that the Spirit gives me as I read this sermon in front of you, a single line that I don’t use at the other church – or maybe I do.
Last week, the Spirit had me to plan ahead of time the worship service with the sermon – and the part where we told our neighbor we loved them and why. The Spirit guided the selection of the after sermon song, a song written in the 1970’s that many of you told me you loved, a song which the Spirit had led me to select a few weeks ago so you would remember it, a song the Spirit had led me to practice ahead of time and add the drumbeat to because I knew Calvary’s piano player Candace would be out of town, something the Spirit had planned a couple of years ago when Candace had joined the choir that took her to Toronto that week she missed. Yes, the Spirit plans far ahead - in this case, at least two years. And during the delivery at Calvary, the Spirit told me to tell you to go to a second friend and tell them that you loved them also. That was NOT in the original plan, but it turned out to have unleashed the Spirit among you.
And so I’d like you to understand that the Spirit both plans and works spontaneously. Don’t limit your understanding of the Spirit to purely an emotional impact that a sermon has on you. For the Lord is not just emotion, but is also rationality. The Spirit is not just spontaneous, but also plans centuries in advance. The Spirit is not just speaking in tongues, but is also a still, small voice in your head who would guide you in your actions, in your speech, in your daily life if you will listen, just as the Spirit guides pastors to put some thoughts down on paper and not other thoughts, to add or subtract a few words when those written sermons are delivered, to speak with emotion or to speak dryly and clearly from time to time.
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of the Spirit is where the Spirit comes from in a body. For, you see, Paul tells us in Ephesians Chapter 4 that there is one Spirit – and if this is so, then this means that the Holy Spirit resides in you just as much as the Spirit resides in me or Saundra or any other preacher. You each bring the Spirit into church, just as much as the preacher does. For there is only one difference between all of us – how much do we listen to the Holy Spirit and act upon the Spirit’s suggestions?
For if we allow it, if we listen to the Spirit, if we act upon the Spirit, then Jesus’ words become true: “the Counselor, the Holy Spirit…will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.”
And the Holy Spirit, my friend, is the greatest Counselor, the greatest mentor, the greatest adviser the world has known or ever will know. And THIS is why the early Christians we see in the Book of Acts were so excited. This is why the early church grew so fast. This is the key reason why a group of people who had lost their visible supernatural leader were able to quickly spread from Jerusalem west to Greece, to Italy, and even to Spain and Britain, to spread south to Ethiopia, to spread north to the shores of the Black Sea, and even spread East to India within the lifetime of the disciples. The Holy Spirit is why within two hundred years this tiny sect of Judaism had become a new religion which was the most powerful religion in the entire Roman Empire.
And since those days, the Holy Spirit has led this religion to become the largest religion on the planet, where the Spirit today is leading the growth in India, in Africa, in South America, even in China, persecuted as those Chinese Christians are, and yes, even today in America it is the churches that recognize the Holy Spirit is a gift given to ALL Christians that are growing whereas those churches to whom the Holy Spirit has become a frightening concept are shrinking and dying.
Let’s all stand and hold hands in a big circle. (If you are reading this, simply pray by yourself.)
Let us pray.
Holy Spirit,
We ask you to come upon this congregation in a great and mighty way.
I ask you to come upon me in such a way I cannot deny you.
I ask you to fill me….to mold me…to guide me…to speak to me.
I ask you to turn up the volume so I can hear you.
I ask you to guide me to the sound of your voice.
And I ask you to speak to me in the silence of this place now…[Pause]
I ask you to now give me a message to proclaim to others…[Pause]
And now I ask you to give me the courage in a moment to speak that message.
This I pray…in the name of our Lord Jesus….Amen.
And so I ask you today to turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor”! “You have the Holy Spirit!” And turn back to your neighbor with all seriousness and say, “Neighbor”! “The Spirit has told me this...” And speak out that message!
The defining mark of the Holy Spirit is not when a sermon is changed at the last minute. The defining mark of the Holy Spirit is when truth is taught and the Spirit sets up a situation where, if you are willing, you can be transformed by that Truth. Remember what Jesus said:
But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit—the Father will send Him in My name—will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.
Sometimes, the most important part of worship preparation, I have found, is in the selection of a hymn from four hundred years ago or from 1930 or that first appeared last year, the selection of a prayer that was written decades ago or from scratch, the choice to read from the Psalm instead of from Romans, or yes, the one-line throw-away that the Spirit gives me as I read this sermon in front of you, a single line that I don’t use at the other church – or maybe I do.
Last week, the Spirit had me to plan ahead of time the worship service with the sermon – and the part where we told our neighbor we loved them and why. The Spirit guided the selection of the after sermon song, a song written in the 1970’s that many of you told me you loved, a song which the Spirit had led me to select a few weeks ago so you would remember it, a song the Spirit had led me to practice ahead of time and add the drumbeat to because I knew Calvary’s piano player Candace would be out of town, something the Spirit had planned a couple of years ago when Candace had joined the choir that took her to Toronto that week she missed. Yes, the Spirit plans far ahead - in this case, at least two years. And during the delivery at Calvary, the Spirit told me to tell you to go to a second friend and tell them that you loved them also. That was NOT in the original plan, but it turned out to have unleashed the Spirit among you.
And so I’d like you to understand that the Spirit both plans and works spontaneously. Don’t limit your understanding of the Spirit to purely an emotional impact that a sermon has on you. For the Lord is not just emotion, but is also rationality. The Spirit is not just spontaneous, but also plans centuries in advance. The Spirit is not just speaking in tongues, but is also a still, small voice in your head who would guide you in your actions, in your speech, in your daily life if you will listen, just as the Spirit guides pastors to put some thoughts down on paper and not other thoughts, to add or subtract a few words when those written sermons are delivered, to speak with emotion or to speak dryly and clearly from time to time.
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of the Spirit is where the Spirit comes from in a body. For, you see, Paul tells us in Ephesians Chapter 4 that there is one Spirit – and if this is so, then this means that the Holy Spirit resides in you just as much as the Spirit resides in me or Saundra or any other preacher. You each bring the Spirit into church, just as much as the preacher does. For there is only one difference between all of us – how much do we listen to the Holy Spirit and act upon the Spirit’s suggestions?
For if we allow it, if we listen to the Spirit, if we act upon the Spirit, then Jesus’ words become true: “the Counselor, the Holy Spirit…will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you.”
And the Holy Spirit, my friend, is the greatest Counselor, the greatest mentor, the greatest adviser the world has known or ever will know. And THIS is why the early Christians we see in the Book of Acts were so excited. This is why the early church grew so fast. This is the key reason why a group of people who had lost their visible supernatural leader were able to quickly spread from Jerusalem west to Greece, to Italy, and even to Spain and Britain, to spread south to Ethiopia, to spread north to the shores of the Black Sea, and even spread East to India within the lifetime of the disciples. The Holy Spirit is why within two hundred years this tiny sect of Judaism had become a new religion which was the most powerful religion in the entire Roman Empire.
And since those days, the Holy Spirit has led this religion to become the largest religion on the planet, where the Spirit today is leading the growth in India, in Africa, in South America, even in China, persecuted as those Chinese Christians are, and yes, even today in America it is the churches that recognize the Holy Spirit is a gift given to ALL Christians that are growing whereas those churches to whom the Holy Spirit has become a frightening concept are shrinking and dying.
Let’s all stand and hold hands in a big circle. (If you are reading this, simply pray by yourself.)
Let us pray.
Holy Spirit,
We ask you to come upon this congregation in a great and mighty way.
I ask you to come upon me in such a way I cannot deny you.
I ask you to fill me….to mold me…to guide me…to speak to me.
I ask you to turn up the volume so I can hear you.
I ask you to guide me to the sound of your voice.
And I ask you to speak to me in the silence of this place now…[Pause]
I ask you to now give me a message to proclaim to others…[Pause]
And now I ask you to give me the courage in a moment to speak that message.
This I pray…in the name of our Lord Jesus….Amen.
And so I ask you today to turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor”! “You have the Holy Spirit!” And turn back to your neighbor with all seriousness and say, “Neighbor”! “The Spirit has told me this...” And speak out that message!
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