The Gift of the Holy Spirit

If you have your Bibles, we'll be reading from the book of Acts, chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

The focus will be Acts, chapter 2, verse 38.

Acts 2:38

Again, this will be number 3 on one verse, if you haven't noticed.

So we'll be moving faster after this.

Remember I said sometimes we move fast, sometimes slow. But we'll be reading

from chapter 2, verse 36.

If you're there, give careful attention because what I'm about to read is God's holy and inspired word.

Verse 36, Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has

made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and

to the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do?

And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name

of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.

And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit for the promises for you.

And for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.

And with many other words, he bore witness and continued to exhort them,

saying, Save yourselves from this crooked generation.

So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added to that day about 3,000 souls.

This is the word of the Lord. You can be seated.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, as we are looking at the gift of the Holy Spirit.

We ask now that by your Holy Spirit, you would do a work in us,

help us to see what we need to see and hear what we need to hear,

to be convicted where we need conviction, to be encouraged where we need encouragement,

strength where we need strength.

Lord, send us your spirit now, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

So last week we were looking at the issue or the doctrine of baptism as it's

coming to us from Peter's great sermon in Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And I won't go over all those facts, but I do want to remind you just some highlights,

especially if you're visiting for the first time.

We baptize by sprinkling or pouring because that's the biblical mode.

If you don't believe me, go back and listen to last week's sermon. It's online, I think.

We baptize our children because they're members of the covenant.

We don't believe it saves them.

We don't believe it's automatic. but because they're members of the covenant

and they belong to Jesus Christ they're heirs of that promise and therefore

heirs of that covenant sign so now we get to the second part he said repent, be baptized,

and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit,

maybe just as controversial as the issue of baptism is the issue of the gift of the Holy Spirit,

and by the way after last week's sermon no one here thinks baptism is controversial

it was clear I think but Again, listen to the sermon online,

but the gift of the Holy Spirit is also one of those.

Doctrines among many Christians that are believed in different ways.

So what is the gift of the Holy Spirit? Do you have the gift of the Holy Spirit?

I think I may have told you this story or repeated it, but a friend of mine

once when I was in college asked me, he said, Charles, have you received the gift of the Holy Spirit?

I said, I think so. Yeah. But no, but have you spoken in tongues?

I said, no. He goes, then you haven't received the gift of the Holy Spirit.

At the time, I thought, well, I thought when I got saved, I thought when God

changed my life, I was given that change that we call regeneration by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

In fact, my instincts were correct. They were biblical.

And I think my friend, as sincere and wonderful as a Christian as he is,

was misguided in thinking that the gift of the Holy Spirit is something added

or extra beyond your own salvation. Right?

Well, here in Acts, and I want to look at this, when we talk about the gift

of the Holy Spirit, a lot of times people focus not so much on the gift of the

Holy Spirit, but on the signs that point to this gift.

Tongues, visions, wonders, healings, and so forth.

Those are legitimate signs given to the apostles so that their new message,

and as the new messengers, they would be authenticated before God.

What message did they bring? Well, they brought the message of Jesus Christ,

that he's the risen Lord of glory. In fact, he was raised from the dead.

They watched him in a glory cloud presence ascend into heaven,

and there he sits enthroned over all.

And from there, he will come to judge the living and the dead.

And yet he left them in Jerusalem.

He left them there and there. Some of them were still, and remember the angel

like, why are you looking up?

What's going on? Why do you keep looking up as if something else is coming?

Wait here for the promise.

What is the promise? The promise is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

It says, for the promise is to you and to your children, Acts 2.39.

This is a promise that we talked about at the beginning of Acts. Acts 1.4.

And being assembled together with them, he commanded them not to depart to Jerusalem,

from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said,

you have heard from me. So the coming of the Holy Spirit is connected to the whole Pentecost event.

A promise which was given from the father of old, a harvest festival that was

given from the father of old.

So this is, what's happening is not something brand new or out of nothing new,

but it's coming to us from the Old Testament, like baptism.

If you don't see the Bible connected together with the Old and New Testament,

then you'll separate them and you won't understand how they work together.

If you see everything in the New Testament flowing into and growing out of the

Old Testament, you'll see them put together quite nicely. What is this promise?

The whole Pentecost event wraps itself around the promise. Remember,

not the signs of the promise, but of the promise. Where did it come from?

John 14, which we read earlier, verse 16, it says, and I will pray the Father,

and he will give you another helper, that he may abide with you forever.

Verse 29, and now I have told you before it comes, that when it does come to

pass, you may believe. This is the promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit

to the church, to constitute the church as the church.

And remember, to bring Christ to the church. This is something I'm going to say.

I hope I don't say it too much. If I do, I'm just going to go back to what my

old teacher said, that the repetition is the mother of learning.

So I'm going to keep saying this over and over. The gift of the Holy Spirit

is the gift of Jesus Christ himself. Okay.

In Luke chapter 24, verse 39, I think a week or two ago, we also read that,

Luke 24:39

where this is Jesus on the road to Emmaus with his disciples.

They're down, they're discouraged. They don't quite know what's going on.

And Jesus explains to them the connection between the Old and the New Testament,

perfectly fitting together in him.

Verse 44, he said, then he said to them, these are the words which I spoke to

you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled,

which were written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms.

All the laws and the Psalms and the prophets are all focused on Christ.

These are the things concerning me. And he opened their understanding that they

might comprehend the scriptures.

Then he said to them, thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the

Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.

And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to

all nations, beginning in Jerusalem.

And you were witnesses of these things. Behold, ready, I send the promise of

my father upon you, but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you have endued

with the power from on high.

What is this promise? It is the promise of old, is the promise given in ancient

days that when Messiah comes, he will establish his kingdom.

It's a kingdom that would be radically different than anything anyone ever expected.

It was not going to be a Jewish kingdom to rout the Romans and to drive them

out of Jerusalem and perhaps drive armies all the way to Rome to slaughter Caesar.

Many of them wanted that.

This was going to be a kingdom established by the power and breath of God himself

through the work of the Holy Spirit.

And it is a powerful kingdom, the most powerful kingdom that will endure forever.

How does it endure forever? I want to recall your attention.

Remember when those guys were sitting there in Jerusalem, just 13 of them at

first, they were huddled, they were fearful, they were scared.

They had just been given the Great Commission. Don't forget that.

And basically Jesus said, make disciples of all the nations.

Ha, ridiculous.

It was so implausible. It's ridiculous on face value.

How could these 13 men ever make disciples of all the nations?

No small. I want to remind you,

Christians, Christianity is the largest religion in the face of the earth.

And it started here in our passage when 13 fearful men were given a promise

and then these same men chose, or 11, sorry, I'm not counting my apostles right.

I didn't, I just moved yesterday, so you'll have to forgive me.

Yeah, 12, sorry, back that up, reverse. 11 and then to 12.

I don't know how I got 13. Anyway, it was much better if I get my numbers right,

but these 12 men eventually were given the task of conquering the world,

and they did, and they are.

How? What army?

What political group did they have? Nothing.

They simply had the work and power of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The coming of the promise of the Father occurred at Pentecost,

and the coming of this promise, the gift of the Spirit, was accompanied by powerful signs.

The extraordinary gifts of the Spirit must be distinguished however,

from the signs that accompany them.

Those signs were given for the apostles for the apostolic age.

When the apostles have passed, the age has ended of the Old Testament.

The New Testament age has finished or has begun.

That means that those signs accompany the new message are finished.

Again, I want to remind you, that doesn't mean that just because we're not going

to have a healing service or we're speaking in tongues or doing the kinds of

things that many of our Pentecostal brothers might do, that we're left as orphans.

Those were signs pointing to the ultimate gift of the Holy Spirit.

Beloved, we have that gift.

This is exciting. It's not that we're going to do signs and miracles and wonders.

It may be somehow temporarily more exciting, especially if you see it.

We're just now trying to clap.

We're having a hard time clapping at our church, let alone dancing,

shouting, and having miracles. So that would be hard. That would be extraordinary to see, actually.

But it's not the extraordinary experiences that accompany the signs.

It is the promise and gift of the Holy Spirit himself.

The gifts of the Spirit in great measure connected to the pending judgment of Jerusalem as well.

Why were there tongues? Many reasons, only one of which, though,

not least of which, was that Jerusalem was coming under judgment.

Jerusalem was now hearing foreigners speaking in different languages in their own city.

In all the Old Testament, when you see that, the Jewish people knew they were in trouble.

Judgment was coming. The promise is connected not merely to the judgment of

Jerusalem and the judgment of the Israel Jewish kingdom, but the bursting forth

of an international order.

And I don't mean the United Nations.

A new international tribe, a new tribe that's marked by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And the gift of the Holy Spirit brings those new people into love and peace and unity together.

And this is something also I wanna mention. The gift of the Holy Spirit was

not primarily given for you and for me to have some sort of deep,

personal, emotional experience.

This is very confusing. I think most people, when they say, oh,

wow. I mean, sometimes I've heard people say at a meeting, wow, did you hear that music?

And that, yeah, praise and worship music. Yeah. They've said the Holy Spirit was there.

I said, eh, I heard, did you hear the lyrics?

What was, oh, they'd know the way it felt. I knew the Holy Spirit was there.

Keep asking this question, how do you know that the Holy Spirit is at work among a people?

It's not their movements, not tongues, signs, miracles, wonders,

or even a personal feeling.

Sometimes, by the way, if it is a personal feeling that the Spirit brings to

you, it may be sadness and grief and conviction of sin.

It may not be just an emotional high.

Personal experience is not the point or major focus of the coming of the gift of the Spirit.

Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit was to bring Christ to his church.

Remember that. That's the context.

Christ had gone. He's in glory. They can't see him.

And they were longing for him. And when the Spirit came at Pentecost,

they got him. And so do we.

It's a powerful experience. Yes, it's personal, but it's not fundamentally or

primarily personal or only personal.

He is our helper. John 14 says, these things I've spoken to you that while I

am still with you, but the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send

in my name, he will teach you all these things and bring to remembrance all that I've said to you.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you.

Not as the world gives, do I give to you.

Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

The Holy Spirit comes to us and brings Christ to us in our hearts to dwell in

us, in the word of God that is preached, yes, in the music and songs that we

sing together, and even in the Lord's Supper.

The Holy Spirit is at work through your faith to bring Christ to you so that

Christ may dwell richly in you.

Jesus promised to send another one. Sometimes you hear the word parakletos,

one who walks aside, one who walks along with you, who's a helper,

he's an intercessor. He's a comforter.

He's someone who gives light and instruction and conviction and help and guidance.

I'm gonna read a little bit of a quote. It's a little bit theological-ish and

wordy, but I think it's worth noting. This is from Dr. Richard Gaffin.

If you know or read Richard Gaffin, you know it's probably going to be a bit

wordy, but stick with me. Are we together?

He says, emerging in our discussion then is one of the most basic controlling

principles of Christology and pneumatology.

See, pneumatology just means the study of the Holy Spirit.

Namely that absolute coalescence or total congruence or going together in the

church between the work of the exalted Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.

The work of the Spirit is not some addendum to the work of Christ.

It's not some more or less independent sphere of activity that goes beyond or supplements Christ.

The Spirit's work is not a bonus or an added basic element to your salvation.

Rather, listen to this, the coming of the Spirit brings to light not only that

Christ has lived and has done certain things, but that he as a source of future

life now lives and is at work in the church.

In the coming of Christ, the gift of the Spirit is nothing less than the gift of Jesus Christ.

Christ is with us, gives new meaning to that word Emmanuel, because the disciples

didn't think so. They saw him leave.

We don't see him physically, and yet we have the gift of Christ in the Holy Spirit.

It's amazing. I remember all the way back in seminary when I had a class on

patristics, just study of the early fathers.

And one of my professors, as the early church was wrestling with the doctrine

of the Trinity, who is Jesus, who is the Holy Spirit, who is the Father?

How do they live together? How are they eternally one?

And our professor, Dr. Kelly, said something when we were looking at the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

He said, brothers, the Holy Spirit is the most humble of the persons of the Trinity.

And I would challenge you to think about this. Never in the work of the scriptures

do you ever see the Holy Spirit coming and saying, I'm the Holy Spirit, I'm at work, look at me.

The work of the Holy Spirit is always to point us to Jesus Christ,

to call us to the Father through Christ.

So if you see the Holy Spirit as an added extra benefit or bonus,

you're misunderstanding the very purpose for which the Holy Spirit is working among us.

The Holy Spirit brings us nothing less than Christ himself.

This is how Paul describes it. Romans 8, he says, But you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit.

And if indeed in the Spirit of God, the Spirit of God dwells in you.

Now, if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he's not his.

And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is

life because of righteousness.

But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,

Are you with it? The Spirit comes and dwells in us.

And who dwells in us when the Spirit comes? It is Christ.

He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies

through his Spirit who dwells in you.

Therefore, brother, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the

flesh. But if you live according to the flesh, you will die.

But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the bodies, you will live.

For as many as you were led by the Spirit, you are the sons of God.

For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear,

but you received the spirit of adoption by whom we cry, Abba, Father.

It is the Holy Spirit that dwells in us. It is Christ in us.

The work of the Spirit is one and the same as the work of Jesus Christ.

And that's in us. Don't forget. And I started the Acts and I'll work my way

through it also repeating this.

The book of Acts is much about the work of Christ and the work of the church,

the work of Christ in the church and through the church.

The Holy Spirit didn't just come to save a collection of individuals so that

you could have Christ dwelling in you.

He saved a collection of individuals. He called them out of darkness into light,

and he gathered them in the church so that the Holy Spirit is dwelling in the

church as a body, a corporate body.

We might say it's ecclesiastical in that sense.

Pentecost and the surrounding miracles teach us that Jesus' promise is present in his church.

Christ is present and active here and now and will be in the future until his coming.

Again, Pentecost, the Pentecost event, you might even call it the constitutional

convention of the church.

55 delegates gathered. I know the history. They weren't in Philadelphia. They were in Jerusalem.

They were gathered there together, and they were constituted the church when

the Holy Spirit came to them at Pentecost.

This is an amazing thing. Again, signs, wonders, healings aside,

we have, as God's corporate people, Christ dwelling in us.

And when we are together as God's corporate people, it's a rich,

magnificent, unique experience as God's corporate people, as the church.

And it happens nowhere else on earth.

The Old Testament, remember the Old Testament, when they met with God,

when God's presence came to be with them, they had to travel maybe to the tabernacle,

maybe to Mount Zion, maybe to the temple.

There was a distance. They even had special festivals and special times when

they would travel and go to the city of Jerusalem because God was dwelling on that mountain.

But beloved, now that Christ has come, God no longer dwells in a city on a mountain in Jerusalem.

He dwells everywhere that the church is gathered together, in the church.

The distance has been closed. We live in great times, not times of miracles,

signs, and wonders, but of the age of the Holy Spirit.

And you today, if you're believing in Jesus Christ, you've been gathered here by that same power.

And by that same power, you'll be sanctified and perfected to the end.

We live in the temple of God now as the church, not one made with stone,

but where Christ dwells.

I'm encouraging you because I'm going to say it towards the end over and over

a couple of times that the Holy Spirit comes to us and one of the things he

does in us is he turns us inside out.

He literally turns us away from self and selfishness and self-centeredness unto

Christ and to others and we belong to the church when we do that.

1 Corinthians 3.16 says, Do you not know that you are the temple of God and

that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

And if anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him.

For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.

And 1 Peter elaborates more. He says, Coming to him as a living stone rejected

indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious.

You also, that's us, the church.

You also, as living stones, are being built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.

To offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God, to Christ.

Therefore, it is also contained in the scripture, behold, I lay in Zion a chief

cornerstone, elect, precious, and he who believes in him will by no means be put to shame.

Therefore, to you who believe, he is precious, but to those who are disobedient,

the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone and a

stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.

They stumble being disobedient to the word to which they were appointed,

but you, church, are you awake? Are you listening? It's a long quote.

You, church, you are a chosen generation. And I want you to note,

these were words once entirely and uniquely and exclusively reserved for the nation of Israel.

And now Christ through Peter is saying, these belong to us.

You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,

his own special people, his treasured possession.

Remember when we talked about the 12 tribes of this new nation,

how we basically said, now we're members of a community where we are beloved people.

That is our identity as the church. God loves us and we are his beloved.

That you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

You who were once not a people are now the people of God.

You who had not obtained mercy have now obtained mercy. We don't have the gift

of the spirit to experience warm sensations or deep spiritual encounters per se.

Course, I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't study your Bible and pray.

We're going over the spiritual discipline of prayer in Sunday school. Of course you should.

And of course, you should be doing it private in your prayer closet,

as we talked about in our Sunday school class, alone with God,

where only God can see you and only God hears you.

So you're not trying to pretend or trying to mount up words.

But primarily and fundamentally, even that personal experience of prayer is

to be directed to Christ and his glory and to his people and to the coming of his kingdom.

It is turning us inside out.

And so when we worship on Sunday morning, we are people who are worshiping by

the power of the Holy Spirit. And it's not just the music.

And the reason I say that is because there's a huge movement now that has conflated

just praise and worship music with worship period.

Just praise and worship. Many times when I was in Africa, many times people

would say, hey, let's have praise and worship. They didn't mean have a sermon.

They didn't mean have the sacraments. They didn't mean bring tithes.

They meant sing praise songs.

Anyone who had a guitar could be a worship leader. Just sing praise songs.

And they would always say, oh, we know the Spirit's here because we hear this

music. There's a pushing together. And by the way, it's intentional.

One of the creators of Hulsong, one of the worship leaders says this,

that when we praise God, our praise is irresistible to God.

Interesting. He must come. As soon as he hears us call his name, he is ready to answer us.

That is the God we serve. Every time the praise and worship team with our musicians,

singers, you also have to have these production teams, dancers and actors,

begin to praise God, his presence comes like a flood.

Even though we live in his presence, his love is lavished on us in a miraculous

way through praise music.

Beloved, that's not true. Yes, God works through praise music,

but he also works through the preaching of the word and the sacraments and all

the other things we do in worship.

What that has done is it basically has changed worship into a personal,

emotional experience for people.

That is primarily why almost every church, especially ones that grows,

has to have a huge praise band with a huge worship leader team and productions

and actors and light shows and everything else.

Worship is basically religious entertainment to stimulate people to have a personal

experience and then to leave saying the Holy Spirit was at work.

The gift of the Spirit, on the other hand, brings love and peace and unity in

the church. That's how you know a church is filled with the Holy Spirit.

Colossians 3 says, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised,

barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all together.

We are a new community with no ethnic barriers, no national barriers,

no gender barriers per se, no barriers between the old and the children. We're all one in Christ.

Everything through the power of the Spirit is exploding outward and upward to

God's glory and outward into the world.

That's why Paul says in the same passage, Colossians 3.16, let the word of Christ

dwell richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and

chems and spiritual songs,

singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord and whatever you do in word or

deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God.

And that is one of the keys, isn't it?

When the spirit of God is at work, glory is brought to Jesus Christ.

Glory is brought to Jesus Christ. And beloved, as we start to close,

I want to encourage you in that.

We are part of that. If you're here and you're a Christian, the spirit has worked

in you and the spirit continues to work in you.

And we want that spirit to work in you so that Christ will dwell richly in you.

The gift of the Spirit has dimensions that relate beyond just our own personal

experience to others, and it continues.

I wanna mention a few things.

I'm gonna try not to get too culturally in the weeds a little bit, but I kind of have to.

I live where you live. I see what you see as well.

I see what's going on in our culture. We live in a culture that is,

it's not enough to say that people are obsessed with themselves.

People worship themselves.

I just mentioned a book that's worth noting called Philip Reeves,

The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Uses of Faith After Freud. This was published

in 1967, by the way, 1967.

And he said, with the movement away from religion and towards psychology,

spirituality will not return to a classical Judaism or Christianity in which

life is shaped by transformed in relationship to things like doctrines or teachings.

Rather, a consumerist desire to pick and choose one's own spirituality through

broad experimentation.

No longer anchored by the church, no longer anchored by the work of the Holy

Spirit, people will begin to see that their lives, their self-actualization, finding themselves.

You hear that in every Disney movie, by the way, too. Find yourself. That's bad, by the way.

Finding themselves through psychology. And recently, a book not too many years

ago by Carl Truman called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,

Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

He outlines where we are.

He outlines where we are. He goes through the series of history,

and I won't go through all of it, but it's amazing because it's leading us to where we are.

If you were to ask my grandfather, he said, can a boy become a girl or a girl become a boy?

He would have thought it was the beginning of a bad joke.

It's ridiculous. Of course, it's ridiculous. It wasn't possibly,

you weren't able to even think it because it's so absurd. It's so contrary to

reality. And here we are.

Here we are. How did we get here? According to Truman, about 300 years of philosophy

and psychology and thinkers brought along this idea like Darwin that the world

was created, but it wasn't created by God.

We don't need God to explain science. We don't need God to explain anything.

Charles Taylor and Alistair McIntyre, Truman goes through and outlines what

they call an inward turn to morality, an inward turn into self.

I define my own truth. I define my own reality.

An inward turn. He goes on to look at Rousseau and Nietzsche and Marx and Darwin.

I won't bore you. I loved it. It's a great book. There's also a new popular

version of the book. Get the popular version.

The big one's about 400 pages, but it's worth reading because you scratch your

head and say, how did we get here?

How did we go from a Western culture that everyone knew that a boy was a boy

and a girl was a girl? It wasn't a question.

You didn't even need to make an argument because it was so blatantly obvious.

According to Truman, he said, the worldview is not simply cognitive.

This gets us to the whole Charlie Kirk issue recently.

The worldview that's swimming around us lately is not a worldview that you can

win by making a good argument.

Worldview is not that. He says, rather, today we live with peoples are ordered

by affection, habit, and desire.

It's not a cognitive, it's not a good argument, it's not a rational reason.

And it's usually related, he said, to sexuality, serving self.

The world has gone, what Truman describes, from homo adorans,

worshiping man, to homo eroticus, eroticus, sexual man.

So that The way we define and identify ourselves is all according to our own desires.

The modern West, he says, is simply bearing bitter fruits of a rotten tree.

And we are, we are. We're in a constant world of flux.

And recently, again, with the assassination of Charlie Kirk,

I was reminded that arguments, I watched, like everybody in the whole world,

I was watching some of these arguments.

I was like, he's not a racist. He's not hateful. He's making arguments on a college campus.

Prove me wrong. by the way, when he was assassinated, he was proven right, ultimately.

It's not about an argument because Charlie Kirk's faith was about pointing people to Jesus Christ.

And I must say that I've never seen anything like it in our culture in the whole

history of since I've been just turned 60, you know, that's not that old.

But I can recall the days when we've been through troubles as a nation and as

a culture. And I can recall where I can recall 9-11.

I can recall 9-11 and when we had everyone, every third bumper sticker was United

We Stand. And I thought in my heart, maybe we're going to be turning to God.

Maybe this is it. Maybe the Lord will be humbling us and maybe we can turn to God. And I was hopeful.

George W. Bush called a worship service at the National Cathedral.

And I thought, oh, wow, wonderful, until I watched it.

And then it looked like something out of the Star Wars bar scene.

I don't know if you've seen Star

Wars. Maybe you haven't. Maybe you shouldn't. It's up to your parents.

This collection of religious nonsense. Of course, you have to have your imam from Islam.

You have to have your rabbi from Judaism. You have to have a lesbian bishop

from the Episcopal Church. You have to have all this hodgepodge of polytheistic nonsense.

And I looked at that and I said, people told me, oh, aren't you happy,

pastor, that we had a worship service? I said, you think God's happy?

God's happy looking at this nonsense? I think maybe God is angry.

If I were God, I said that if I were God, I wouldn't be happy with lesbians

and queers and Muslims and Jews all saying God, God, God, but they don't mean the same thing.

But what happened recently with the Charlie Kirk assassination,

I've never seen anything like it.

At that memorial service, and I'm not going to speak to anyone's sincere motives.

Maybe everyone was just doing it to be politically correct. But if this is the

new political correctness, I'm all for it. because almost every speaker at that

service gave glory and honor to Jesus Christ.

Not God generically. I don't know if you watched it. It's worth watching.

I've never seen anything like it. Everyone's always in our culture,

both sides of the aisles, Democrats, Republicans, they're always saying, God bless America.

God bless America. They don't mean our God.

They don't mean the true and living God. But here at this service,

you saw the Secretary of State, Secretary of War.

Okay, Trump was the weakest, I'll tell you that. Anyway, you can even stop at Trump if you want.

But before that, every one of these speakers was giving glory,

not to God in general, but to Jesus Christ.

I heard Marco Rubio, I've never thought much about him, to be honest.

He preached the gospel from the fall to the death of Christ,

to the resurrection and glory and only hope in Jesus Christ.

When the Spirit of God is at work, you do see things like this.

You don't see generic polytheistic worship services. is you see people saying

Jesus Christ is Lord of glory.

And that's a good thing because the Holy Spirit turns people inside out and towards Jesus Christ.

The question now for us as a culture of people and more importantly as a church

is where do we go from here?

Will Jesus Christ truly be acknowledged, truly be worshiped, truly be adored?

And the answer, my friends, is in one thing, the Holy Spirit.

We need to pray for the continued work of the Holy Spirit for true reformation,

revival, and blessings to the church. The church first.

I'm all for the blessings of America. I lived in Africa. I love Africa too.

I want the church in Africa to be blessed, and Asia and South America.

I want the church in America, but it's the church of Jesus Christ.

For the church of Jesus Christ to be blessed, we must continue to pray for the

Holy Spirit. Because there is no argument, my friends.

If you go up to someone who thinks that a man, a grown man who thinks he's a

furry female critter, there's no argument for that.

There is something that can change him, and that's the Holy Spirit.

Think about it. We're not there yet. I'll jump ahead.

The Apostle Paul, when we get to the martyrdom of Stephen, the man holding the

coats for the people who killed him was the Apostle Paul, who was at that time named Saul.

And Saul wasn't just holding the coats for men who killed Stephen.

Saul was on a crusade to destroy Christianity.

It wasn't an argument that changed him. It was the work of the Holy Spirit that

threw him off his horse on the road to Damascus and gave him a focus on what? Jesus Christ.

And our thinking should be future-oriented. If the apostle Paul's of the world

can be changed, if people around us today can be changed, and they can, and they will,

as glory goes to Jesus Christ, we need to be a part of that by praying earnestly

for the work of the Holy Spirit in our own hearts, in our own church.

And from there, let it flow down the mountains. like Amos said,

let justice roll down like waters, like a flood.

Our thinking needs to be future oriented, but our thinking, first of all, needs to be inside out.

Even one of the speakers, I think it was Tucker Carlson or someone said,

start with me, because that's where it has to start.

The Holy Spirit working in me to cause me to repent and cause Christ to dwell

richly in us. Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit.

We have no hope, we have no life without it.

We pray now that as we come to the Lord's table, that you would send your spirit,

as we have heard your word preached, as we have sung praises to you.

Now we hope to feast with you, to eat the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And we pray that your spirit, when your spirit comes, Christ comes to these

elements. Christ is there in the bread and in the wine, in the body and in the blood.

And therefore feed us on Christ, we pray by the power of your Holy Spirit.

We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.