Spirit of God Wk1: Justin Huibregtse | June 07 |

Good morning, Easteridge.

My name is Justin.

I'm a senior pastor here, and I am really excited today because, well, it's the start of summer.

It's the first June Sunday that we have this year, and it's um the kids are out of school, which means that we are starting our new summer sermon series.

It's three S's in a row.

So if it sounds like I'm I have a Lisp, it's because I'm I'm doing a lot of S's in a row.

So, but I'm also gonna be talking about the spirit of God.

And that's what our sermon series this summer is all about.

Uh to today, we um, you know, uh over the next few weeks, uh, we're gonna slow down uh and during this sermon series and and ask two big questions, okay?

Two really big questions.

First, who is the Holy Spirit?

What does he do in the life of a believer?

And then the second one is who is God and what is he like?

So the the first half of the series will focus on the Holy Spirit.

You know, we're gonna go, we're gonna talk about his presence, his power, his leading, the fruit of the spirit, spiritual gifts, and what does it mean to be a spirit-filled people?

And then the second half of this sermon series is we're gonna talk about, uh we're gonna lift our eyes and talk about the attributes of God and his holiness, his faithfulness, his power, his knowledge, his presence, uh, his love, and his glory.

And, you know, this some of these things are what are called communicable attributes, which means that we can also have these attributes, and then some of them are incommunicable, which means that we don't get to have them.

Um but but nonetheless, we're gonna we're that we're gonna tie it all together with one simple idea that the Spirit of God forms us to know God, to worship God, and become more like Jesus.

So our unifying scripture is this.

It's not gonna be on the screen, so just listen to this.

It's from 2 Corinthians 3, 17 and 18.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image.

So that transformation is something that we're going to be talking about, and how the Holy Spirit allows that transformation to happen, along with how we can, you know, have these attributes of God that are going to show us exactly how He works and how that image of God transforms how we do and how we go about our lives.

So, you know, this this is that's where we're going this summer of freedom, transformation, glory, the Spirit of God making us more like the Son of God.

But today we begin with foundation.

We begin uh before we talk about you know what the Holy Spirit does, we need to ask a question: who is the Holy Spirit?

And here's it, here's this really simple answer.

The Holy Spirit is not uh an impersonal force, he's not a vague feeling.

The Holy Spirit is not a spiritual electricity that we can kind of just only feel.

The Holy Spirit is not an emotional atmosphere of a worship song, although the Holy Spirit is in all of those things.

We can experience the Holy Spirit in those ways, but it is not limited to those feelings and those circumstances.

I think a lot of Christians have an easier time picturing God the Father and God the Son than we do the Holy Spirit.

You know, we when we think about the Father, we can at least begin to understand uh the categories of Father, Creator, having authority, being a provider.

When we think about you know Jesus Christ the Son, we think about how we he's portrayed in the gospels.

Jesus is teaching, he's healing, he's walking with his disciples, he's at the cross, he has risen from the grave.

But when we think about the Holy Spirit, many of us get a little foggy and we we don't think about what the Holy Spirit is about.

For some of us, the Holy Spirit feels mysterious.

It's a great big mystery.

Um for some, the Holy Spirit feels confusing.

Well, it's it we don't understand it.

It's a it's a lot of knowledge out there that we don't quite get.

Um some of us might feel a little intimidated by the Holy Spirit.

That we know that it is it is a one of the entities of our the Trinity God.

And depending on your church background, you may have seen the Holy Spirit talked about in ways that felt either too cold or too strange, right?

You know, um some churches talk about the Holy Spirit like he is barely there when when that's just not true at all.

Uh other churches talk about the Holy Spirit in ways that make people feel a bit nervous and take a step back.

Like at any moment someone might start doing laps around the sanctuary, and we're all supposed to know what to exactly what to do with that.

You know, and some of us are Baptists or, you know, uh Norwegian Baptists or German Baptists, and we, you know, when someone raises their hand during a worship song, we think revival's happening.

Amen, right?

You know, and and and you know, it's but but here's the danger of all of those assumptions is that because the Holy Spirit can feel mysterious in all those aspects, we quietly ignore him.

Say, I don't, I don't get that, I don't get that, I I don't want to, I don't want to be involved in this.

And so we start to ignore and we start to say, I don't think I need to understand the Holy Spirit as much as the Bible says that we should.

The Bible presents the Holy Spirit as the personal presence of God with his people.

From the opening lines of Genesis to the life of Jesus, uh, from Pentecost to the life of the church, from our salvation to our sanctification, the Holy Spirit remains central to all of those.

So today I want us to recover wonder.

Recover wonder, not confusion, but more clarity.

Not hype, but complete surrender.

Because the Holy Spirit is not a force or a feeling.

He is God.

So some of you hear that and think, I believe that, I know that, I've heard that, I've heard these things.

But here's the question: do we live like it?

You know, we can we can read in the Old Testament, we can read about God who is the provider, who is the authority, God who is the Father.

We can read in the Gospels about how, you know, how who Jesus is, what he has done for us, how he was on the cross, how he walked on water, and all of those amazing stories.

We just got done reading the book of Acts, and we can see that the Holy Spirit is working in those people, but but how do we live like that?

Because really the the work of the Holy Spirit and the book that is being written about the Holy Spirit is still being written today.

It is happening in the church, it is happening in all of our lives.

So, because many believers live as though Christianity is mainly about trying harder, we we try harder to be patient, we try harder to be loving, we try harder to overcome sin.

We try harder to pray, we try hard to share our faith with Jesus.

We try, you know, to be like Jesus.

And effort does matter.

We we talked about that.

But Christian growth is not powered by self-effort alone.

The Christian life is not Jesus saved me now, I'll, you know, let me take it from here.

I got it.

I know what I'm doing.

I can read the Bible and I can read books and I'm gonna do it all by myself.

It's not what the Christian life is about at all.

The Christian life is with God by the Spirit of God.

Some of us are exhausted because we are trying to produce spiritual fruit without spiritual dependence on the power of the Holy Spirit.

Some of us feel distant from God because we've forgotten that His presence, God's presence in our life, is not just around us, but with us continuously.

Some of us need to hear this today.

If you are in Christ, you are not alone.

You are not abandoned.

You are not spiritually orphaned.

Jesus has given his Holy Spirit to us.

And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

Not bondage, not fear, not condemnation, freedom.

The Christian life is not God watching from a distance, it is God dwelling with his people.

So today we're gonna talk about five attributes to build off of for the rest of this service of about who the Holy Spirit is.

So the first one is that the Spirit is present at creation.

Let's read this together.

We're gonna start in the very beginning, in Genesis.

Um, one of my common phrases that I like to say when I uh am studying the Bible and want to really get down to a concept that we study in the Bible is that go back to Genesis.

Starts in the beginning.

What does it say in the beginning?

So here we are, right in the beginning, Genesis 1, 1 and 2.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

The Bible opens with God creating.

Before there is land, before there are stars, before there are animals, before there is Israel, before there is a humanity, before there's a temple, before there's even a church.

The Spirit of God is there, hovering over the waters.

The word gives us this image of a divine presence, divine power, divine readiness, and creation is formless and empty, and the spirit of God is present before God speaks creation into order.

He's doing that by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And this idea, this passage here gives us one of the great truths of the Bible.

Where the Spirit of God is present, where the Spirit of God is in your life, in our lives, in our church, in our world, chaos can become creation.

Darkness does not intimidate him, emptiness does not intimidate him.

Disorder does not overwhelm the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit of God brings life, order, beauty, and purpose.

That is true in creation, and it's true in us as well.

How the Holy Spirit transforms us to be more like Him.

Some of us came in today feeling a little without form and void, maybe, where we, you know, have a little bit of chaos going on.

You know, we just got out of May Sember, which is, you know, if you're a parent, you have about a thousand recitals to go to and final things happening at school, and the kids are bringing a million and one things home with them, and you don't know what to do.

It's just that, you know, the summer is here and you're trying to find exactly what to do with all of them.

But that disorder, that emptiness, that chaos that can exist in there, the Holy Spirit's not afraid of it.

He's willing to put order to that chaos.

The Spirit of God is present before the light breaks through into the world.

Alright, so the Spirit was there in creation, in Genesis.

Second thing, second attribute is the Spirit is not an it.

The Spirit of God is not an it, but a person.

This is important because many people think that the Holy Spirit as a as a power or an influence, you know, kind of like a conscience or something that's going to tell us what exactly we need to do.

But scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit personally.

The Holy Spirit teaches, guides, speaks, can be grieved, intercedes, gives gifts, leads us.

That is not how the Bible talks about an impersonal force.

Anything that I just listed is normally done by a person throughout the whole Bible.

That includes the Spirit.

This was right before Jesus went to the cross.

Jesus is with his disciples.

He is preparing them for his death.

He knows that they are troubled, that there is chaos, there is disorder happening.

They don't know what's going to happen next.

He knows that they are afraid.

And he says in John 14, 16 and 17.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper to be with you forever.

Even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.

You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

Jesus calls the Holy Spirit another helper.

That word can mean helper, advocate, counselor, comforter.

The idea is not merely someone who gives you a little boost when you're having a bad day.

The Spirit is the presence of God who comes alongside you as you are going through it.

Teaches, strengthens, comforts, convicts, and remains with you.

You do not lose the Spirit of God.

Jesus says the Father will give you another helper.

That means that the Spirit continues the personal ministry of Jesus to his people.

Jesus is going to the cross, Jesus will rise, Jesus will ascend, but Jesus does not leave his people as orphans.

He doesn't abandon them.

God doesn't want any sort of abandonment to happen.

The Holy Spirit is Jesus' promise that his people will never be abandoned.

So we know that the Spirit was there in creation before creation even began.

He is there.

The Spirit is not an it, it is a person.

And also the Spirit is God's personal presence with his people.

Just like it says in John 14, verse 17, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot see because it is neither sees him nor knows him, you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

John 14:17

That is stunning when we think about what that actually means for someone to be with us.

In the Old Testament, God's presence was often associated with sacred places.

The tabernacle, the tent of meeting, the temple, the holy of holies.

God was present with his people, but there was still distance.

There were priests, there were sacrifices, curtains, boundaries.

But Jesus is preparing his disciples for something new.

The Spirit will not simply be near them.

It will not take a priest to go be with the Spirit of God.

But the Spirit of God will be in you, will dwell with us.

This does not mean God was absent in the Old Testament, not at all.

The Spirit of God was still there.

But it does mean that through Jesus, through Jesus Christ, God's presence with his people becomes deeply personal and internal.

Not just something that exists, you know, in a in a temple, in a building.

It's very personal.

This is what the prophets anticipated.

In Ezekiel, God promised, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you.

And then later on it says, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.

That is not just behavior modification.

That's inside of you transformation.

Transformation from someone who did not have the spirit at all to having the spirit continuously with us all the time.

God does not merely say, just try harder.

You know, try harder, make more sacrifices.

He says, I will put my spirit within you.

God does not merely command change.

By his spirit, he creates change within us.

The spirit also brings freedom.

Spirit brings freedom.

We read it earlier today, you know, about how that freedom, now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

Now we need to be careful with this because, you know, when the Bible says freedom, it does not mean freedom to do whatever we want to do.

It doesn't mean that we get to just, you know, kind of go and sin and keep on sinning and get and keep on being separated from God.

That's not biblical freedom.

Biblical freedom is not no one can tell me what to do.

Biblical freedom is being released from slavery to sin so that we can belong fully to God.

We don't have to sin anymore.

We're not held by that in that bondage.

We have freedom from condemnation, freedom from trying to earn our righteousness that we can never ever do.

Freedom from the veil that keeps us from seeing Christ clearly because of what that sin does to us.

Freedom from the old life, freedom to worship, freedom to obey.

We get to do that now.

Freedom to become more like Jesus.

In 318, it says, and we with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image.

The same image.

The Spirit brings freedom.

And that freedom leads to, like I said before, to transformation.

The Spirit does not set us free so we can stay the same.

When you look at, you know, how we how Peter was transformed, how Paul was transformed, how all the Acts, uh the apostles in the book of Acts were transformed.

They're completely different people from the very beginning of that book to the end.

The Spirit frees us from sin so he can form us into Christ-likeness.

The Spirit also points us to Jesus.

This is crucial.

This is one of the main reasons why we have the Holy Spirit in us now.

Because the world says, forget about Jesus.

The world says we don't need Jesus in our lives.

We can figure it out ourselves.

We can do all these things on our own accord.

We can get to heaven.

We can earn our way to heaven by our own means.

The Spirit reminds us that we need Jesus and it points us right to Him.

The Holy Spirit does not draw attention away from Jesus, He glorifies Jesus.

Jesus says later in John, says, He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

He will declare it to you.

So if you want to know whether something is truly spirit-led, one question that we need to ask is, does this glorify Jesus?

Does this action that I'm performing glorify Jesus?

And the Spirit will give you an answer.

Does this lead people to worship Jesus?

Does this make people more like Jesus?

Does this align with the word of Jesus?

Does this produce the character of Jesus?

The Spirit of God always magnifies the Son of God.

So this series in the Holy Spirit is not a detour from Jesus at all.

It is not.

It is a deeper invitation into life with Jesus.

That we are exploring and being transformed into a new life with him.

Not away from him.

Not also with him, but all together.

The spirit-filled life is a Jesus-centered life.

So today, we need to respond.

We need to respond by knowing that the Holy Spirit is God with you.

You need to know that.

The Holy Spirit is God with you.

You are not spiritually self powered, you are spirit indwelled.

So remind yourself of that.

This week, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit is God with you.

And next, we need to feel.

We need to go back to wonder.

Not confusion, not uh, not sort of anything that that's going to.

Make us nervous, but wonder.

Go back into that mindset of being wondered and be in awe of what the Holy Spirit is doing.

The presence of God is not a theory to study.

Although it's very fun, okay?

It's very fun to study the Spirit of God.

It's very fun to study the presence of God.

It's very fun to understand the Trinity.

But the presence of God is not only a theory to study, it's a wonder to receive.

And third, we need to begin each day in surrender to the Spirit.

A spirit-filled life begins with daily surrender.

So as we begin this series, let's begin with wonder.

The Spirit of God hovered over creation.

The Spirit of God was promised by Jesus.

The Spirit of God dwells with believers.

The Spirit of God brings freedom.

True biblical freedom.

The Spirit of God transforms us into the image of Christ.

He is not a force.

He is not a feeling.

He's not an accessory to the Christian life.

It's not something you just, you know, conjure up and say, I need some help with this only.

It is as you are going, as you are experiencing the Christian life, as you understand who Jesus is, as you understand who God the Father is, as you understand who the Spirit of God is, the Spirit of God is with you, transforming you.

He is God.

So today the invitation is simple.

Behold wonder.

Receive the freedom that he brings.

Surrender to his leading, the Spirit of God's leading.

And let the Spirit of God form you more and more into the likeness of Jesus.

Let's pray.

Father God, thank you for sending your son.

Jesus, thank you for living for us, dying for us, rising for us, and making us aware of forgiveness and making a way for us to be forgiven and be made new.

Holy Spirit, we acknowledge today that you are God.

You are not distant.

You are not impersonal.

You are not merely a feeling.

You are the presence of God with the people of God.

Forgive us for ignoring you.

Forgive us for trying to live the Christian life in our own strength.

Forgive us for choosing control over surrender.

Today we ask you to lead us.

Holy Spirit, fill us with wonder.

Bring freedom where we are bound.

Bring conviction where we are resisting.

Bring comfort where we are weary.

Bring transformation where we are stuck.

Make us more like Jesus.

And as we begin this series, make our church a people who are deeply dependent on you.

May our worship be full of your presence.

May our homes be shaped by your fruit.

May our ministries be empowered by your gifts.

May our lives point clearly to Jesus.

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

So, Spirit of God, we surrender to you.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

As we move into worship today, we need to remember what we just prayed for.

So we we have a we have a new song that we're going to sing today.

The Holy Spirit is not an idea that we admire from a distance, He is the personal presence of God with His people.

And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

So this new song, if you don't know the words, it's okay.

You can just sing these words and hear these words.

Don't feel that pressure, but let the melody and the truth truly wash over you as you experience this.

Learn it as we sing it together.

Sometimes a new song gives us a fresh language for an old and beautiful truth.

So when the Spirit of God moves, hearts soften.

When the Spirit of God leads, fear loosens its grip.

When the Spirit of God fills us up, worship becomes more than just words.

When the Spirit of God brings us near to Jesus, everything changes.

Everything changes.

The Spirit of God moves through you so that you can change, so that we can change, so that the church can change, and then the world changes.

So as we sing, don't just sing about change.

Surrender to the one who brings that change.

Open your hands, open your heart, and ask the Spirit of God to make Jesus real to you again.

To allow that change to truly happen.

Because when God's presence meets God's people, we are not left the same.

Let's stand and sing together.