The Holy Spirit // Holy Spirit | Pouring, Hovering, Sealing

So our teaching scripture this morning is very short.

It is only one verse from Romans chapter 5, verse 5.

Romans 5:5

It says God's love has been poured into our hearts through

the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

This is the word of the Lord. Good morning.

How are you guys doing? All right.

It's great to be here with you this morning.

There are people who are taller than me, and that's better.

OK, That's too much. It's good to be here with you

this morning. If you are new with us, my name

is Jared. I'm one of the pastors here.

And we'd love to have an opportunity to meet, to meet

you. And you know, I'll.

I'll look for you. We're a small enough community

that if you're new, I, I, I can tell and I'd love to meet you.

So, and it's OK, you can bowl out immediately and you don't

have to meet me. That's totally fine as well.

It's really, I love child dedication Sunday.

You know, all of all of our kids were dedicated at a church.

Three of them were dedicated at this church.

And, you know, my kids are in college now and there's

something really beautiful about a community of people and even

just the way that that we all experience this.

I mean, you can, you can always count on a couple kids going a

little crazy during child dedication, right?

Laying on the floor and grabbing for things.

And it's like this prophetic sort of witness of a community

to be able to witness the realities of parenting.

Like it's just messy. And you know, those of you who

are parents know that. Those of you who have parents,

you know that parenting is just really messy.

And it's really beautiful to have a community of people

around you to bear witness to the mess and to help.

And I just got to say that this church has been a place where we

have felt so supported in raising our kids.

And so I'm really grateful for so long ago, you know,

dedicating kids, you know, 20 some years ago.

So anyway, hello beautiful. This is the the title of a novel

that my friend Tyler sent to me a couple of months ago.

Because it's a story inspired by contemporary family that is

inspired a little bit by Louise May Elcot's book A Little Woman.

How many of you have read? How many of you wish you have

read Little Women because you keep hearing about it.

And as a family with four girls, one of whom is named Josephine

after one of the main characters in the story, let's just say

that we have a thing or two to say about Little Women.

And Hello Beautiful is primarily about about love.

It's about love. And because I think this is a

book that you should probably just go ahead and read, I'm

going to give you the no spoilers version of the book.

It's a story that follows a boy named William Waters.

He's a young man who grows up in a home devoid of love because of

a family tragedy. And so basketball becomes his

lifeline, giving him structure and a sense of purpose.

And when he gets to college, he meets Julia Potavano.

And she is an ambitious and fiercely devoted young woman

with dreams of building a future of purpose and family.

And Julia has three sisters, Sylvie and Cecilia and Emmeline.

And the Potavano household is is vibrant and chaotic and full of

affection, which is the complete opposite of William's

upbringing. You guys ever like recognize

that like there are families that lived differently than your

family did. That can be a bit awkward.

But as William becomes entwined with the Potavano sisters, long

buried emotional wounds begin to surface.

Things get a little messy and chaotic and uncertain as some of

William's mental health struggles begin to surface.

And over time we get a story of what it looks like for someone

who was nearly empty of love become surrounded by people who

learn how to love him. Here we go.

Wrong button. I don't know, surrounding him

and learning how to love him and filling him up so that he too

eventually has some love to give away.

And listen, life still happens. Of course the story is not a

rose colored like, you know, ROM com.

It's just not that. But what it is, is a story about

what it looks like for people to surround one person and who is

in the midst of chaos and emptiness and uncertainty of

life and learning how to love that person and that person

learning how to receive love. So read the book.

I'll come back to it. OK.

Our teaching text this morning is a really short 1.

Romans chapter 5, verse 5 says God's love has been poured out

Romans 5:5

into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

And I'm going to lead with this primary image that the apostle

Paul has given us in this letter to the church at Rome.

And the image that God gives us, and I want you to sort of

imagine this in your mind, is the image of the person of the

Holy Spirit pouring out the love of God into our hearts.

This is where we're going to begin and then we're going to

move around a little bit and briefly meet the person of the

Holy Spirit in a couple of different contexts because it's

really hard to know a person from just one place or context.

Like I have this friend who's probably one of the smartest

people I've ever met in my life, you know, undergrad at Harvard,

PhD at MIT, and he's sort of just pretty buttoned up and, and

like, speaks incredibly eloquently and just super

successful guy in the world. And, and so my, my image of this

person has basically been shaped by sort of knowing that about

him and interacting with him in different ways.

And then we were all in New York City together and somebody had

the idea that we should go to a Korean karaoke bar.

And this guy became an entirely different person.

Like, I don't know what you're like at a karaoke establishment,

but you get me around karaoke. And I literally just sort of

like, do the Bart Simpson, you know, I, I, I don't want

anything to do with karaoke. I, I, I might be able to do one

song and everyone will be embarrassed on my behalf, but

this guy, man, he was incredible.

And for hours and hours and hours, he's like, let's go,

let's go, let's go. So you know, you, you got to see

your people in multiple contexts in order to get a full picture

of them. And the same is true with the

Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a person.

And the scriptures give us these pictures and metaphors of the

kind of activity that the Holy Spirit is doing in the world.

And the three things that we're going to look at today are

pouring, hovering and sealing. So first up is going to be

pouring. We're in a series, a brief

series right now on the Holy Spirit.

And our friend Joel Seymour a few weeks ago opened it up by

reminding us that the Holy Spirit is a person, not just

like this inanimate power or force.

It's not Star Wars, OK? The Holy Spirit is a person that

Jesus left behind in order to be with us so that we can

experience the fullness of the presence of God at all times.

And then last week, Tori talked with us about the work that was

set apart and empowered by the Spirit for Craftsman and artists

to bring all of their skill and their knowledge for the carving

of wood and the weaving of fabrics in order to make the

place of worship for the people of Israel who were roaming

through the desert and, and they needed a place to worship in a

Tabernacle. And so the Holy Spirit gave them

gifts and empowered those gifts and put their hands to work,

enabling something to be built so that these people had a place

to worship. And the challenge that she gave

us last week was to not forget that all the work that we're

engaged in, the emails and the conversations and the lesson

plans and the project planning and the painting and whatever it

is that you do, all of it has the capacity to be something

that we partner with the Holy Spirit in as we use our gifts,

empowered by the Spirit, to partner with God in the world.

It's really good. There's a sense in which,

friends, we have to receive the gift that God has given us to

move out into the world with energy in life.

And so we began thinking and talking about the person of the

Spirit empowering us for the work out there in the world.

And Parker is going to lead us along that same theme again next

week. What is it like for the Spirit

to empower the work out in the world?

That there are contours of our life and context that we have

work to do and we need a little bit of help in order to do that.

But this morning I want to focus in on what the Holy Spirit is

doing in you and around you and for you.

So the first image is this image of the Holy Spirit pouring the

love of God into our hearts. God's love has been poured into

our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,

says Paul in Romans, his letter to the Romans.

So let me just like ask you a little question.

If we had the capacity to to sort of open up your heart like

the top of a tin can, like what do you think it is that we would

see right now? Like if you just had the name,

sort of the particular flavor of the mix of things going on in

your heart right now, how would you like, how would you name

that this season or maybe this week or maybe just today?

Like what would you call it? And I'm not asking, I'm not

asking this in any way that is meant to kind of throw shade at

whatever it is that's going on inside of you or even put you

back on your heels. Like I can imagine that there's

a vast array of things that we might have sort of blended up in

in a blender, like a smoothie going on inside of our heart.

Does that make sense? I had a smoothie yesterday when

I was writing some of this. So that's there you go.

That's what it is. There's probably some fear and

anxiety and hope and excitement, maybe even some grief and

sadness. It's all mixed up in there,

isn't it? You know, more than 50% of

people prior to COVID indicated that there is a fair bit of

loneliness at work in the everyday of their lives that

just sort of sits there. And on the other side of COVID,

that number has actually skyrocketed such that, you know,

even medically they're calling loneliness like an epidemic.

Like we are living society societally through an epidemic

of loneliness. Guys, people are lonely.

And so if you have some loneliness in your smoothie mix

inside of your heart, like it's OK, you're not alone.

There is something happening, broadly speaking, in Western

culture, in American culture that has us feeling all kinds of

things. And so if you're most people,

you have probably a little bit of a challenge naming the

specific cocktail of emotion that makes up what is going on

in your human heart at any given moment.

We have one of these pillows sitting on our couch that helps

us out a little bit. You guys are like, that's

brilliant. You can get it for 1299 at

Amazon. Not right now.

You can. You can wait like till after

church. But seriously, like this could

be on your couch tomorrow morning if you're an Amazon

Prime member. And I want you to look if you

can see it. I tried to get a big enough

picture. Do you see the centre of that

pillow and notice what is absent at the centre of that pillow?

Love. Love is absent at the center of

that pillow. This is sort of a tool that is

to help us get in touch with and name what it is that is at work

inside of us. And love is at is completely

absent there. Never in a million years did I

imagine that I would have a theological squabble with a

pillow. But as I look at is what is at

the center in the core, these six primary emotions of fear,

anger, disgust, sadness, happiness, and surprise.

And I set this up next to the Apostle Paul's description of

what it is that the person of the Holy Spirit is doing and has

done. And this fact of God's love as

being one of the primary theological points that the

apostle Paul is making in his letter to the church at Rome.

I can't help but see a picture that feels a bit confusing to

me. The only mention of love is

sitting somewhere down near the bottom of the outside of the

circle just before 6:00 PM. Second picture loving.

Now this particular pillow is pulling from a psychological

model of emotion developed by psychologists like Paul Ekman

and Robert Pluchik, whose work has identified what they call

the primary emotions. The six that sit at the center

of this pillow are Paul Ekman's description and his

psychological work. Robert Pluchik would add joy and

anticipation to these six to make it 8.

But what they both agree upon is that these emotions are

considered universal across cultures.

They're they're biologically hardwired and they they're

expressed similarly in facial expressions and physiological

responses across different cultures.

It's not that other emotions don't exist.

I mean, clearly from the look of that pillow, I mean, some of you

are like, there's that many feelings.

Really. There is actually, and this this

pillow is actually really helpful.

So it's not that there are are other emotions that don't exist.

It's just that these six are like the primary colours of our

emotional wheel. They're basic emotions that

nearly everyone in the world can feel and express.

And the reason that love doesn't sit at the centre of this pillow

is because love is considered a complex emotion, particularly

because it involves multiple emotional components, relational

context, and different layers of meaning.

Does this make sense? Do you guys feel complexity

around love a little bit? So primary emotions like fear or

anger tend to arise suddenly. Like, like if you ever noticed

that, like you can get angry real quick or you can become

afraid real quick. You're out in the garden, you're

like minding your own business. You're pulling the weeds, you're

planting some zinnias and this little garden snake comes across

your path. And it's just like right now

listen, it's not snakes for me. It's definitely dogs for me.

Like I am terrified of dogs. And you're like, don't you have

a dog? And I'm like, yes, I do have a

dog. It's pretty complex

relationship, but I have a lot of like dog trauma and so it's

been like a whole thing for me to try to actually like have a

dog and like we're becoming buddies a little bit.

I don't know, it's complex. So these emotions can come

quickly and they sort of function universally.

They're hardwired into the human psyche almost like a biological

response. That's why when most people see

a snake, there's this immediate sort of biological response

because these kinds of of, of, of core emotions, they sit at

the center and, and that the colors that we primarily paint

with. But love, love develops over

time. I mean, even if you believe in

love at first sight, it's actually not love that you're

feeling. It's all kinds of other things,

but but love takes quite a bit of time.

It is something else entirely. Love deepens over time through

experience and intention and relationship.

And so psychologically, love is typically seen as as as a

composite emotion involving joy and trust and attachment and

desire. And it's deeply, deeply

relational. Here's the thing about love

that's going to sound obvious. You cannot love alone.

It's impossible to love by yourself.

And love is also shaped by context and history and

commitment. And there's actually a lot of

complexity that goes into it. So like what we refer to when

we're trying to use the word love.

So when I ask you to pop open the top of your heart and peer

into it and try to figure out what is it that is going on

inside of you. You probably had a greater

degree of access to the primary emotions of anger and grief and

sadness and maybe some anticipation or hope.

Because biologically these things sit at the surface and

and they're things that can pop up really quickly.

Whereas love is multi dimensional, one that varies

across time and relationships. And so like, you know, the way

that I, the way that I love John or, or the way that I love Katie

is, is quite different than the way that I love Sadie because

she's my daughter. Or the way that I love my wife

Jamie now 1/4 century into our relationship is really different

than the way that I loved her in year 3.

This makes sense. Do you see how complex this is,

friends? Love is complex because love is

relational, and so while love does not sit at the center of

the psychological model of what it is that's probably going on

inside of our heart, it is at the very center of the

theological model of what is going on in our entire lives.

The only thing that sits at the center of your life with God is

whether or not you are receiving the love of God and experiencing

it. And that's a complex

relationship, isn't it? How many of you know that that's

a complex relationship? But this is a really important

thing for us to know that God's love has been poured out into

our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

So the very complex thing that love is and the thing that the

in the world that we most long for and the thing that is often

most difficult for us to name at the center of our heart.

Love is the thing that is being poured out into our hearts in an

infinite measure, cascading like a waterfall.

Isn't that just so beautiful that the thing that is like most

complex is the thing that the Holy Spirit has been given a job

to to make sure that? We are getting dose after dose

after dose of that. So how can we have love be the

primary emotion or affection that sort of fills up our heart?

How do we how do we become a little bit more attuned to it?

Well, the only way to do that is relationship.

This one verse that we're looking at so far comes in the

middle of a beautiful articulation by Paul to the

churches in Rome where Paul is trying to tell the story of the

human condition with all its complexities in this love

relationship with God. There's there's this reality

that the Apostle Paul was trying to bring these people into that

puts at the center of the human experience, the human desire to

be filled up with something. So Saint Augustine named this as

a kind of restlessness that is at work inside of our hearts.

You guys ever had a season where it just, you just feel like

unbearably restless and anybody like, OK, like, just like this

restlessness in your heart, like I'm just trying to fill my life

and my heart with something. Because our hearts are made to

be filled. And we look for that filling and

excitement or satisfaction of of sort of getting things right or

being well regarded by others or that sense of security that

comes with having accumulated enough stuff.

And it's like, OK, like I, I have filled my bank account and

now my heart feels at rest. And Paul spends a few chapters

in Romans, actually, the few chapters right before this verse

describing some of the ways that the humans have historically

tried to fill up our hearts with things like, you know, the basic

three are money, sex and power. And all of those are relational

kinds of things, aren't they? We're we're trying to get our

hearts filled up with these kinds of things because this

whole project and love affair with God is relationship is

relational. And because of that, His love is

not coercive. Hang with me here.

God is pouring out infinite love all the time.

All the time. But God is not coercive.

And so God is not going to force God's own love upon you.

Which is why humans end up in quite a bit of a predicament.

The first few chapters of Paul's letter to the Romans, he is

setting out the whole history of God's relationship with the

human. He's talking about God's

affection for his people in the various contexts where God was

trying to to love and the promises that he was making to

the people and the people breaking all of those promises.

And he begins to highlight some of the people in the the the

story of the Scriptures who begin to understand and get the

fact that this relationship and the thing that we're looking for

to fill up in our heart, the thing that we're longing for, is

built on trust and attachment and security and commitment, all

of which the ingredients of love.

The whole story, says Paul, is this giant cosmic act of God

pouring out his love into the world.

And the whole of that story is that the the story of this whole

cosmic reality is a relational story, and God is doing

everything God can do. I'm highlighting, I'm

underscoreting, I'm repeating myself right now.

God is doing absolutely everything he can do to get your

attention, to help you understand that you are loved,

that God loves you, infinite, infinite love.

That's the story. And that that story has been

handed to the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is pouring every

ounce of infinite love into our hearts through that story and

the unfolding story that is your life.

And in the very next verse, Paul writes that the demonstration of

that love towards us is that even while we have rejected the

relationship that God has put on offer time and time again, God

gave up his very own life by pulling it out into the world.

He says that why we will, why we were still weak at the right

time. Christ died for the ungodly.

So what he's saying is that when we were still without strength

to sort out our hearts and to stop seeking to fill our hearts

with all of these other stories, when we just absolutely had no

capacity to reciprocate love back to God or even receive

God's love, God poured his life into the world.

This is how the apostle Paul describes this in another

letter. He says that God emptied

himself, emptied himself out into the world.

It's this picture of this giant pitcher of water being poured

out. The Holy Spirit is pouring out

the love of God into your hearts.

Last night I was drinking my smoothie and finishing up a

little bit of this teaching when I got interrupted by a bit of

the news that the United States military struck 3 targeted areas

in Iran. Now, friends, I don't have much

to say about any of that other than to under score what it

feels like right now. I don't know what it feels like

for you, but it feels a bit chaotic to me in the world right

now. I don't have any thoughts at the

moment about the geopolitics or about what this means for you or

I or the people that we love or our future.

But pastorally, I, I just felt like I have to say something,

right? And I actually don't know what

to say other than it. If it feels a little chaotic,

that's probably pretty normal to be feeling that right now.

Part of what is likely at work in you is a fair bit of chaos.

And what I know about the the geopolitical situation right now

is that is that there are humans involved making decisions, and

humans are really good at chaos. And in the opening lines of the

Scriptures, we read this in the beginning, God created the

heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and desolate,

and darkness was over the surface of the deep.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the

waters. So in the ancient world in which

this was written, the most terrifying thing that existed

was the ocean. So like most scholars conclude

that the text of Genesis was written, you know, in the second

millennial BC, and the seafaring capabilities during that time

were quite limited. You're like rowing in a boat,

you know, in like 2000 BC. And so you'd have maybe some

seasonal ability to sort of navigate the open waters, but

you would never really go too much far outside of what you can

see land. And so in their imagination, the

most terrifying thing that existed in the world was the

ocean, particularly at night time.

It's the experience of the unknown and the outer edge of

the waters of the sea. They come pretty quick.

They, they, they, they come pretty close to summing up what

it was like to fear, to feel some chaos and some feel some

fear. And so if you're, if you're

writing a poem, which is what the beginning of Genesis is, and

you're trying to tell a story about the God of love bringing

life into creation, you're going to set that story against the

backdrop of the chaos of the surface of the sea.

Does that make sense? Like, I don't know how we would

do that if we were trying to tell a similar story.

We would probably start talking about like nuclear war and all

that kind of stuff. In the beginning, God created

the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and

desolate and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the

Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

And this brings us to the work of the Spirit as hovering.

The picture that this story is painting is the image of the

Spirit of God, the the force of God's presence, the wind of

God's breath, who we later meet throughout the Scriptures as the

presence of God, who we eventually come to know as the

Holy Spirit poured out on the disciples at Pentecost.

The Spirit at the very beginning of creation, the poem says, is

moving over the chaos of the desolate and dark places that

hold all of the fears. This is how the story begins.

Later translations of of this Genesis text, particularly in

Aramaic, would show up in the ancient world.

They, they give us this image, this picture of the, the

hovering spirit like a, like a bird flying over water or, or

brooding over her nest. The Spirit of God is hovering

over the waters like a bird flying just above the surface of

the darkness and of the chaos. And if the Spirit of God is

hovering over all of the chaos of the world from the very

beginning, how much more is he hovering over whatever chaos you

are presently facing? Just imagine like, like take a

moment with your imagination and think about some of the chaos

that you might be feeling right now, whether that is just like

happening inside of you or inside of your home, inside the

story of your life, or whether it's related to geopolitical

events. There is so much chaos and what

the Scripture tells us is that the Holy Spirit is brooding

right next to you, waiting for new life to emerge in the midst

of all of that chaos. So we have pouring, we have

hovering. And last I'm going to close with

sealing. Sealing.

The same Paul who wrote the letter to the church in Rome

writes this in his letter to the churches in the ancient city of

Ephesus. He says this.

He says in Him, you also, when you had heard the word of truth,

the gospel of your salvation and had believed in him, were marked

with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.

So friends, there is far more that I would want to say about

this than I have time to say, but I wanted to give you one

last image to describe the work of the Holy Spirit.

And it's this image of the kind of seal that would be placed on

the outside of a letter like a wax seal with an imprint on top

of it. And in the ancient world, the

seal functioned as a, as a powerful symbol of identity and

authority and security. It it was the way that the

sender of the letter communicated to the receiver of

the letter that the stuff that I have written on the inside, it

is from me. It is addressed to you.

And as long as this seal isn't broken, you can trust that

nothing on the inside has been has been tampered with.

Does that make sense? It really functioned as like a

like a security measure. It authenticates the sender and

the recipient could trust that the message kind of made it from

the origin to them. And so Paul is using this

metaphor and he says to be sealed with the promised Holy

Spirit means that you now bear God's imprint, and the infinite

love of God being poured out into your heart along with the

hovering presence of the Spirit around you is now protected and

sealed. The Holy Spirit is the one that

authenticates the letter that God is writing inside of you.

Does this make sense? You do not need to be afraid

that the thing that God is doing inside of you is going to get

tampered with or snatched away. Whatever message that God is

trying to sort of send to you and, and seal up in you the work

that God is doing in you is secure.

You can trust it. It's been sealed by the Spirit.

This is the work of the Spirit, friends.

It's the work of of pouring out the love of God in your heart,

hovering over the chaos within you and around you, ready to

sing new creation into existence with whatever chaos is happening

inside of you and sealing in you what is real.

Authenticating all of the things that He is doing in you and in

me and sort of protecting all of it happening.

Like what a good job the Holy Spirit has, right?

Isn't that an incredible job description?

And here's the thing, like that's like the tip of the

iceberg. But here's some primary

metaphors that I want you to pray into over the course of the

couple of weeks that are ahead of you.

Like, what is the way in which the Spirit of God is pouring out

the love of God into your heart? And you know, you know, I don't

know about you, but like, I just want to say like spirit, like

hover everywhere. Can you just like hover, like

just this image of, of a mother bird?

It's, it's actually helpful for me sometimes.

You know, in a lot of the tradition, the Holy Spirit is

sort of this feminine mothering presence in the life of the

believer. And so if you need that, that

image, you know, Jesus talks about, oh, how I wish I could

have been like a mother hen and, and gathered you up underneath

me. It's that image of of the Spirit

of God sort of protecting and hovering and waiting to speak

new life and and man seal up everything you're doing inside

of me, Lord. So back to hello beautiful,

which I really want you to read. If you can't afford to buy a

book right now. I mean, there's the library.

I will buy this book for you if you want to read it.

I've been trying to think about why I loved reading this book so

much. And I think it's it's simply a

story about an empty heart that is filled with chaos and

insecurity, filled with love, where chaos is pushed aside and

new life is created. And you get the sense in the end

of the story that everything that unfolds, that whatever it

is that has happened because of what they have lived through and

built together is going to be untouchable.

And I, as I reflect on the story, it's a story that is

filled with love. New life is created and it's

full of security. And I'm like, this is a familiar

story. Won't you stand with me?

The kids are going to be coming back in shortly.

The worship team is going to come back up and begin to lead

us into some worship. And as we do that, I just want

to maybe offer a couple of suggestions.

Those of you that are part of our prayer team, can you begin

to make your way up to pray? What do you need today?

It's a question I want to ask you.

Do you need, do you need filled up with the Holy Spirit?

You guys know that that can happen both slowly, but it can

also happen where we invite the Spirit and the Spirit with power

can come and fill you up with His love, with the love and the

presence of God. Are you feeling a little chaos

in your life? We can pray that the Spirit

would would do something in your life to help you feel that that

chaos could birth new creation. And then the last thing is that,

yeah, I got a sense this morning early that there are some of you

that just even question your own place in God's family.

Like it's not, it doesn't feel like a sealed letter.

It feels like a like a letter that somebody's been open and

you're just like, I wonder if this is actually going to get to

the final destination. And I just want to invite you to

come and receive prayer that you would know that you are sealed

by the Spirit, that there is nothing that you need to be

afraid of. So there's all kinds of ways

that we could pray for you this morning.

And then one last thing. I just have a sense that there's

there's some folks here that there's one person here that has

like a hip problem, get a lot of pain in your hip over the past

couple of weeks. And I would love to pray for

healing for that. So let's worship together.

Please come forward for prayer, Tom.

One more thing, even this ties into some of what Jared was

saying, but I just have a sense that someone or maybe a few

people are having the sense of like you want to receive the

love of God. You want to see it in your life,

but there's this curtain that's around you and it's like not

letting you it come to you. And I think God just wants to

pray to ripped that curtain from top to bottom.