Spirit Born - From Death to Life

Hey, it's so good to see you in this new year.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here.

It's my joy and privilege to be able to bring God's word to you this morning.

We are kicking off a new year with a series that we're calling the Church, the Spirit Bill.

At Sacred Mission, we place a really high value and emphasis on the continuing work of the Spirit in and through his people, the church.

Here's what we long for.

We long for every person at Sacred Mission to live with a daily expectancy-filled pursuit that the Spirit of God will work supernaturally in you and through you.

We want this to be a reality of every day of our life, every moment that we're attuned to and aware of the reality, have this expectancy for the Spirit to supernaturally work in us and through us, sanctifying you, manifesting spiritual gifts, emboldening your evangelism, empowering obedient living and even igniting passionate worship.

We want to see the Spirit's work.

We want to keep the Spirit central in our focus as a people who delight in the fullness of the Godhead, the fullness of the gospel expressed in the fullness of who he is.

So over the next four weeks, what we're going to do is look distinctly at the ways in which the Spirit builds the church.

The church that Jesus purchased with his blood.

The church whom the Father decreed would be a people of his own possession before the foundations of the earth were laid.

It is his church.

And so we're going to begin by digging into how the church is a people who have been spirit-born.

It's the Spirit's work creating the church for the glory of God.

So here's what I want us to start by contemplating together this morning.

If I was to ask you, what is God's greatest desire?

What is God most jealous for?

I would love to hear what comes to mind.

Many of us, what we kind of tend to imagine or assume is that God's greatest desire is for our own personal happiness and prosperity.

We count the ways in which he has blessed us and his desire to be kind and generous to us and lavish his goodness upon us.

We think obviously, God's greatest desire is my own happiness and comfort and prosperity.

Or maybe some of us might think that it is for this world peace and equity to all through social justice.

We see the ways in which God cares for the lowly and brokenhearted, how his eye is upon the oppressed and marginalized.

And obviously, what he wants to do is to bring equity and justice to all people, bringing peace on earth.

This must be his desire, greatest desire.

Some of us may think that it's actually for our own personal freedom and liberation from the oppression of sin of which we experience, the brokenness within our world, the destruction that our wicked desires has created.

This must be God's greatest desire to free us.

The truth is this: however, you and I phrase it, whatever words we use to communicate what we might assume his desire is, most people assume that God's greatest desire centers on them.

Their happiness, their freedom, their flourishing.

Because we also see this reality, not just in an assumption, but something that's actually revealed within the scripture about the very intrinsic nature of man.

We have no problem or difficulty loving and delighting in ourselves.

We love us some self.

You see, our propensity is to set God's greatest desires upon our own self as though we're the ones who are the center of his universe.

And this reveals something uncomfortable about us that we have to face, we have to confront.

You and I are deeply self-centered people.

Our only ability to truly love is at its core, apart from the work of God, a love of self.

But here in this passage, the Lord speaks through his prophet Ezekiel to actually show us what his greatest desire truly is.

Verse 22 of Ezekiel chapter 36 says this.

Ezekiel 36 · chapter mention

Those four words, not for your sake.

That phrase should grip our hearts' attention this morning.

God's about to promise the most lavish spiritual blessings for his people.

That his own spirit would dwell within them.

And he begins by saying that it's not ultimately about his people at all, it's about his holy name.

Here in the passage, what we're doing is we're engaging with the Lord, speaking to his people through the prophet Ezekiel.

Now, Israel, they had experienced the Lord's righteous judgment against their sinful idolatry and had been forcibly exiled out of the land that he had given to them, and they've been dispersed into foreign nations where are governed under wicked rulers.

Now, this judgment-driven exile had caused the Lord's name to be profaned among the nations.

This is what he's referring to here in the text.

When he says that my name has been profaned among these nations, what he's referring to is the judgment that he's brought upon his own people because of their sinful idolatry and how he's driven them out of their land, he had given them into the surrounding nations.

And we have to ask the question, but how does that connect to the Lord's name being profaned?

And here's what we have to do.

To understand this, we're gonna need to trace the storyline from Eden to the new creation and watch how God has always been gathering a people for his glory.

What we want to try to do is understand God's purposes in discovering the great story that's being told throughout the full arc of scripture.

All 66 books telling one story, and it is about the glory of God as he gathers a people of his own possession to reflect his nature to all of creation.

Right?

This is what he's talking about here in the text.

What we see throughout the entirety of the biblical story is this that God's ultimate purpose has always been the glory of his name.

Always.

And he accomplishes this supremely by gathering a people of his own possession who reflect his holiness and righteousness to the rest of creation, testifying to the truth that he alone is God.

So, what's God about?

God's about his own glory.

How is he going to get that glory?

It's going to be a gathering of people of his own possession who reflect his person and character to the rest of creation as a visible witness and testimony that there is no other God but Yahweh.

That's how he will receive glory to his name.

This was the purpose of Eden.

In its very good state, it was to be a place filled with people, image bearers of God who reflected their maker's holiness and righteousness, testifying throughout all of creation that Yahweh alone is God.

It was to be this temple filled with the image of God, and his image bearers multiplying and filling the earth, and they would live in righteous obedience, reflecting his character to the rest of creation.

And then the cosmos would look at this world and know that God is God alone.

But after Adam and Eve's sinful rebellion, God began to unfold his redemptive purposes through Israel, gathering a people unto himself, a people who were born from a pagan, nomadic idol worshiper named Abraham, who would bear his name and reflect his character to the wicked nations around them.

He called them to himself.

He gathered them in a land that he had provided for them.

And this land was meant to be an epicenter of his glory.

Yet Israel's ongoing idolatry and rebellion showed us the need of a true and better Israel who would perfectly accomplish the purpose of God.

So Jesus comes to redeem and rescue a people for Yahweh from every tribe, nation, and tongue, a people who would be gathered into himself, the true Israel, by the Spirit's power.

This is the reality of the church.

Right?

If we think that church exists just for us to come to a Sunday morning and hear some preaching and some half-decent music, right, we're missing the purpose of what this is about.

This has almost nothing to do with this Sunday morning.

This has everything to do with the redeemed people who have been gathered into Christ by the Spirit to live in holy, righteous, obedient, in community with one another, as this epicenter of the glory of the name of God, that the world around us would watch and see that He alone is God, testified through the lives of His people.

That's what this is about.

It's not about Sunday morning, it's not about sermon series or some cool thing we're doing on the weekend.

This is about us showing the world the glory of God together.

So the church is this portrait of the finished work of Jesus.

But it's also this foretaste of the fullness of his work that's yet to be revealed because we long for ultimately this purpose fulfilled in the new creation.

What is that going to be?

It's a people who've been redeemed and gathered to a new Jerusalem, dwelling with their God, as they eternally reflect his holiness and righteousness to the cosmos of creation, so that all would know, all would have no doubt, he alone is God.

Do we see the bigger story that's unfolding here?

This isn't about you.

This is about his name.

So when God says in verse 20 through 21 that his name has been profaned among the nations, what does he mean?

He's speaking to how things had appeared to the watching world.

I want us to try and understand some parallels here from the Old Testament Israel to the New Testament church today.

The watching world looked at God's people and thought God had failed because of their behavior, their idolatry, their sinfulness.

Israel now dispersed from the promised land of which God had given them, scattered among idolatrous nations, walking in unrighteousness among foreign people.

To the nations, it looked like God was weak, too impotent to accomplish his purposes.

It seemed as though he had failed, but God would not allow for his name to remain profaned among them.

By his mighty hand, he will vindicate his holiness.

The nations will see him as holy when he takes the Israelites from among the nations where they've been scattered, gathers them from all the countries, and brings them back into their own land.

And hear this.

And he causes them to love him and obey him.

Here's what we cannot miss.

The rebellious, sinful heart of man will never circumvent the hand of God.

The rebellious, sinful heart of man will never circumvent the hand of God.

God's gonna see to it that his holy name is vindicated.

Look at verse 23 together.

And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them.

And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes.

Look at the mercy and the grace of God.

What is his purpose and name?

It is the glory of his name, that his name would no longer be profaned among the nations.

And how's he gonna do it?

He's gonna do it through sinful, rebellious, idolatrous people by calling them back into himself and causing them to love him and obey him.

That is terrifying and comforting for us.

Because he's going to see to it that his name gets the glory that it deserves, and he's gonna see to it that he does it through us.

You see, God's glory is at stake, and he is not gonna allow any human failure to have the final word.

He's not just closing up shop, giving up.

We gave it a good try that, hey, it just didn't work out.

I'm gonna have to go to plan B here.

No, he's gonna make sure.

And how's he gonna make sure?

How's he gonna accomplish this?

Well, let's keep reading in the text.

First, verse 24 tells us that he's gonna take them from the nations and bring them back into the land of which he had given them.

Right?

We we see right here the foreshadow of the new creation where people from every nation is brought and gathered into this celestial city for his glory.

He will gather his people back to the place where they will be clearly established as a people who's set apart for the glory of his name.

But but notice this it doesn't end with relocation.

This isn't just about geography or place, this is about transformation.

Not only is he gonna bring them back into this land, but he's going to do a work in them.

And so we see physical restoration points to something bigger, the spiritual redemption that's so necessary for his people.

God's gonna work in their very hearts, and I'll say this again, to cause them to love and obey him.

I don't have any problem with that.

I'm full of delight and joy and gratitude that God took a man who was sinful and rebellious and idolatrous and self-loving and caused me to love and obey him.

I'm thankful for that.

Let's look at how he's gonna do this.

Verses 25 through 27.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you, and I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and be careful to obey my rules.

Here's what this passage tells us without any mincing of words.

He's not trying to pull punches, he's not trying to be cautious in the language of which he uses.

But I also want us to see first that this passage in Ezekiel, it doesn't stand alone.

We're not just taking one passage from the Old Testament and trying to build a whole theological framework and doctrine around it.

This is consistent throughout the entirety of Scripture.

This is the story of humanity revealed to us by the Spirit through his word.

And it's this that apart from the Spirit of God, the heart of man will never love and obey him.

Apart from the Spirit of God, the heart of man will never love and obey him.

This is the necessary work of the Spirit in His people.

He causes us to love and obey him.

Because apart from him, we would only love self.

And it's for the sake of his name.

For the sake of his holy name, he takes rebellious, sinful, idolatrous, self-loving people.

He causes them to love and to obey him.

And look at the three ways of which he accomplishes this through his series of I will statements he makes in 25 through 27.

The first one is this that he promises to cleanse us.

Verse 25, I will sprinkle clean water on you.

God cleanses us from all our uncleanness.

Because apart from his work, we stand filthy before him.

Like this is what we have to understand.

The scriptures show us that even in our striving to do good, to live the right life, to make all the right choices, to keep our nose clean and be as holy and acceptable as we can before him, God says, No, you are like a filthy rag.

Your self righteousness is even filthy before me.

This is what it shows us.

There is nothing we can do to clean ourselves up and be able to stand rightly before God in our own power and strength.

Even when we try to do the right thing, God says, Don't you understand?

You're doing it in Your own work and in your own power, and that effort to gain my approval and my affection and my love for you is filthy to me.

So not only do I have to cleanse you of all the ways that you've been rebellious and sinful and idolatrous, but I have to cleanse you of all the ways you've tried to earn my affection and approval and acceptance from me.

We need cleaned.

And apart from his work, we will stand filthy, stained, and marred by our sin and our self-righteousness.

But notice it's not just cleansing from our sins.

God says he's also going to cleanse us from our idols.

Why is that so necessary?

Because every sin issue is at its heart a worship issue.

You sin because you worship false gods.

You were created to worship.

You can't help it.

It's ingrained in your DNA.

You are going to worship someone or something.

And in our sinfulness, we place our affections and our worship upon lesser gods who we think will serve us and gratify our desires, but end up ruling us and mastering us and devouring us under their own selfishness.

At its core, sin is a worship issue.

We chase after false gods of money and approval and comfort and control anything but the true God.

And so our idolatry, it's the soil where our sin takes root.

And so God has to cleanse us.

And he has to cleanse us from the very things that we love more than him.

Because the story that we continue to tell over and over again is that if we just love this thing or we chase after this object or we embrace this person somehow, it's going to fix everything that's wrong.

It's idolatry.

And our love is placed on lesser things, and God's gonna cleanse us from them.

Second, we need a heart transplant.

Verse 26.

He says, I will give you a new heart.

I'll remove the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Apart from God, our hearts are hardened toward him.

This is what we see.

Our hearts are hardened toward him.

We don't desire to love him.

And even more terrifying is we're incapable of loving him without divine intervention.

We need a new heart.

And the Lord has to transplant one within our chest, replacing our cold, dead, stone heart with one that is alive and soft and tender, a heart that actually desires him, a heart that's actually able to love him.

Thirdly, we need his indwelling spirit within us.

Verse 27 I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.

Do you hear that language of he causes us to love him and obey him?

You see, the spirit of God indwells his people.

Because we need transformation from the inside out.

I love this.

He doesn't just command obedience through this outward performance.

He doesn't just say, hey, look, I've given you all of my statutes and commands.

Can you just try harder to actually obey them and follow them?

He doesn't put the emphasis on our own effort.

He comes to live within us and he changes what we desire.

He causes us to want to walk in God's ways.

And so the Spirit empowers us to put sin to death, to walk uprightly before Him.

He gives us new affections and we begin to love righteousness, to treasure His commands, and to find that our deepest joy is actually known and discovered in submitting to Him.

You see, we have this assumption that somehow freedom is our ability to say yes to whoever we want to.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

What we know deep down inside, and what the scriptures reveal to us, is that true freedom is found in restriction to saying no to certain things that hurt us and hurt others.

And when we submit ourselves fully to his goodness and his holiness and his righteousness, then not only we flourish, but our neighbor flourishes also.

And that's the beauty of mankind.

Our deepest joy is found in submission to Him.

And it's not because we're forced to submit to Him, but because He's changed our hearts to want to, to desire to.

You see, this need for divine intervention, for God to accomplish what we cannot.

It's not new to Ezekiel.

This isn't something that Israel's hearing for the first time after hundreds of years of being his people.

This has been God's plan all along.

For the necessity of his divine intervention to accomplish his purposes for the glory of his name.

Let's look all the way back to Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy chapter 30, verse 6.

Deuteronomy 30:6

Moses says this, and the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and that you may live.

Even then, God knew He was going to have to transform our hearts to cause us to love and obey Him.

And we miss that, right?

When we're studying the Old Testament, we're looking at these passages, all we see is this list of rules and commands and things that we must follow and be obedient to.

And you think, man, how in the world am I ever going to do that?

How am I going to live up to such a standard that's been set before me?

And God's saying, right here, I know you can't do it.

You're never going to be able to accomplish it unless my hand intervenes in your heart, causing you to love me, causing you to obey me.

And then we see how it would take a supernatural work of the Spirit for us to live the life that God has called us to.

This is exactly what Jesus shares to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, verse 5.

John 3:5

He says, Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

Hear the words of Jesus.

You cannot enter his kingdom through how hard you try.

You cannot enter his kingdom by being better than your neighbor.

You cannot enter his kingdom by striving for his affection.

You cannot enter it in your own merit.

It is only by the supernatural, sovereign will of the spirit to make you be born again that you're able to enter.

We need spiritual birth.

We need the spirit.

Ephesians 2, 1 through 10.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

Do you see the parallel of Ezekiel?

You were dead and cut off from God, but he has called you unto himself and made you alive.

He's caused you to love him and obey him, to walk out the works of which he's prepared for you from before the foundations of the earth.

Do you hear it?

You were dead.

But God being rich in mercy, not giving to us the wrath that we deserved, he made us alive together with Christ.

I got news for you.

Dead people cannot make themselves alive.

This is God's work from start to finish.

He gets the glory.

It is his hand that brings us out of our state of fallen sinfulness and into the righteousness of his character.

From Moses to Jesus to the Apostle Paul, Scripture is consistent.

Consistent.

Apart from the Spirit of God, the heart of man will never love and obey him.

The work of the Spirit is to bring us from death to life, to give us new hearts that love God and desire to obey him.

The Spirit gathers us into Christ and His people so that through the visible witness of the church, we declare to all creation that He alone is God.

All of this, all of this is God's doing for the sake of his holy name.

And here's something that our hearts need to grasp.

I think we have to persuade ourselves of this truth.

Our greatest joy, our deepest satisfaction, our ultimate flourishing, all of it is found only in Him and in the pursuit of His glory.

Church, our ultimate good is inseparable from His glory.

Our ultimate good is inseparable from His glory.

We are fully satisfied and find our ultimate delight only when He is glorified, because there is no greater pursuit than His glory, no greater treasure than beholding Him.

I really value how scholar and commentary writer Ian Dugwid summarizes this thought.

He says, This for God to delight in his own perfections is entirely appropriate.

Since there is no one and nothing greater in which he can delight, to delight in anything less than himself would be idolatry, just as surely as it is idolatry for us creatures to delight in anything less than our great Creator.

Sanctifying His great name, exalting God above all things is the only task for God Himself and for humankind whom he has created in his image.

You see it?

For our ultimate good, for us to experience the fullest possible joy, the most loving thing that God can do is to intervene by his spirit and cause us to love and obey him for the glory of his name.

Listen to that.

The most loving thing God could do is cause you to delight in him by using his spirit to make you alive and to cause you to love and obey him.

Because there is nothing and no one greater in which we could ever delight.

Only in that pursuit will we find the joy that our souls long for.

So, no, God's greatest desire, it doesn't center on your personal benefit.

You're not the center of this story or the center of his universe.

Every spiritual blessing that you and I receive is at its essence a byproduct of his supreme purpose to bring glory to his holy name.

But this is the beautiful mystery, right?

This is the paradox of the gospel.

To pursue the glory due to him is exactly how he most extravagantly loves us.

To pursue the glory he deserves is exactly how he most extravagantly loves us.

His glory and our joy are not competitors to one another.

We don't have to put one out in front.

They co-exist in this supernatural mystery of which we can't fully wrap our minds around, that somehow in him, pursuing the glory he deserves, we find our most ultimate joy as he invites us into that pursuit with him.

They're inseparable realities.

When God acts for his name's sake, we are the overwhelmed beneficiaries.

Because his self-exaltation is our personal salvation.

So if you've never been born of the Spirit, if you're here this morning and you've never experienced this divine heart transplant, this spiritual new birth, today I want to call you to cry out to God.

You can't generate this new life by yourself.

You can't work hard enough to earn his acceptance.

You need him to do only what he can.

Cause you to love and obey him.

So ask him.

We believe that God delights in saving those who come to him in faith.

And if you're here in Christ, if the Spirit has already brought you from death to life, let this truth reshape how you live this week.

When you're tempted to assume that somehow God's greatest desire centers around your own desire.

Remember that his greatest desire is the glory of his name.

And so whether you experience comfort or suffering, trial or tribulation, prosperity or health, no matter what you experience, it is him working in and through you for the supreme purpose of the glory of his name.

So walk in humble dependence because nothing is about you.

You need him.

Expect him to work in you and through you.

You are part of the church that the Spirit is building.

A people gathered for God's glory, transformed by his power, indwelt by his presence.

He acts for his name's sake.

And that stunning, glorious reality is the greatest news that you could ever hear.

Because when God exalts himself, we are the ones who are saved, who are satisfied, eternally loved, and find our ultimate joy.