Encounter

What an exciting time to be alive.

Amen.

God has chosen us out of all of history, all of the time, since the creation of the world.

He's chosen us to be alive in this season and this time, and some of us are like question, mark, why?

It doesn't seem like I'd rather have.

Some of us feel like that.

Maybe we would rather have lived in the 1800s and others would want to live in 2100s.

So it's like you're all over the map, but guess what?

God has chosen us to be a part of this time, this season, to make a difference, and he's got a plan that's greater than our plan and he's working it in our lives and he wants to work through us in this coming year.

So get excited about it and be looking forward to what God has in store.

Mark last week just reminded us that the elder team goes away in the fall, and we do this in order to seek the Lord about what he wants to do in the church, in and through Trinity Community Church, in the new year.

And so we went away in October and we felt like the Lord was very kind to us to speak to us.

Three words that we feel like are going to really inform us as we build out the rest of this year.

So those words were encounter jubilee or freedom jubilee and prepare.

Encounter jubilee and prepare.

Now, when we go away and ask the Lord what he wants, it's not that we're asking Him how he wants to grow the church or practical things that we need to do, necessarily.

It's more about we're asking God what do you need?

What do you, as as people that are a part of this church, need in your own lives?

And, by the way, when I say you, I mean me too, dude, because just because I'm one of the shepherds here in this church does not mean that I'm not a sheep as well.

I am a sheep and I need to hear the voice of God and I need to follow the voice of God, just like everybody else.

And so the messages that I bring are impactful to me, because I've had to work through it during the week or during the time of preparation, and then also the messages that other people bring as well are so impactful and important and informative to me.

So pray that as we begin this talking this morning, we're going to talk about encounter.

I thought about the title of close encounters of a God kind with sounded nice, but I just stuck with encounter.

We'll just go there.

We're not trying to be too cool for school, right?

And we're going to talk about encounter, especially when it comes to the person and presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, very important.

Let's look at John, chapter 14, verses 16 and 17.

John 14:16

It says and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper this is Jesus speaking to his disciples 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 what In you.

Let's pray, father.

God, I thank you for your word.

I thank you that your word is truth and life.

And we ask, lord, that you would cause our eyes to be open to what the spirit is teaching us this morning, that it would inform us that it would transform us.

And, father, that we would take what we've received and give it to others so that they can be affected in such ways themselves.

And, father, we also ask that you would reinvigorate us when it comes to our desire to encounter you in our daily lives.

And, lord, as we take this moment just to be silent, father, we ask that your presence would be here and speak to each and every one of us.

I just want to ask us just to be still for just a minute in the presence of God.

Thank you, lord, thank you, father.

Bible says be still and know that I am God, and I just want to encourage you guys.

Let's not let the busyness of life, let's not let all the distractions and the noise stop us or hinder us from really taking time To just be still in the presence of a holy God.

That's not just something that we should be experiencing on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday night.

This is something that we should be experiencing every day of our lives.

And it's not just the feeling, although it does come with feelings.

There's something so powerful about a God who cares enough about us to want to encounter us Amen.

So quick question.

These are not trick questions, so real, easy answers, right?

So if you had to find God, the Father, this morning, where would you find Him?

If you had to locate Him, like, knock on His door, where would he be?

He's in here, but where is he actually?

Literally, he's on His throne in heaven, isn't he?

And where is Jesus Christ, his Son.

He's at the right hand of the Father.

And guess what he's doing there?

He's interceding on our behalf.

Aren't you so glad that God didn't just send Jesus to stand in the gap one time for us, but for all of eternity he continues to stand in the gap, to stand on our behalf, praying for us, standing between Satan and God as a stopgap.

When Satan comes in like a flood, god raises up a standard against him, and the standard is Jesus Christ.

Thank God for that truth.

Where is the Holy Spirit?

Holy Spirit is in the earth.

He's in the earth, and for those who are followers of Jesus Christ, he's in us.

He's in us.

So why is it then, if those three things are true, god the Father is in heaven on His throne, as he should be.

God the Son is at His right hand, as he should be.

The Holy Spirit is in the earth, dwelling within us.

Why is it that we very rarely hear people talking about the Holy Spirit?

Doesn't that seem strange?

Well, there's lots of reasons for that, and we're going to get into that a little bit.

One of the main reasons is, I believe, that there's an all-out attack that Satan attempts in order to, in any way he can change our perspective or distract us away from what's really important and what's really true.

And there's been no other doctrine that I know of in the whole body of Christ, including the Rapture, not Rapture and any other thing that you could list or name that has been more misunderstood and caused more division than the Holy Spirit.

That is not God's intent, that is man's doing and that is Satan's doing Right.

So we want to make sure that Trinity Community Church by the way, it's in our name Trinity we want to make sure that we are not God the Father, god the Son and the Bible, as important as the Bible is.

The Bible is the written word of God, it is our manual, it is our, it gives us a pattern of living, it gives us the perspective of who God is and His character and His nature and who Jesus is, all of those things.

But the Bible cannot replace the Holy Spirit as a part of the Trinity Right, and that's what Jesus was trying to say here.

I want to get into that in just a minute, but I want you to picture in your mind, derek and John just let us in a time of communion, and the verses that they were reading were found in the book of John in relation to what I just read.

Jesus has come triumphantly you know, triumphantly entered into Jerusalem and he sends His disciples out to find a room so that they can have a supper together.

They get together, he washes their feet and says that they should be servants.

As he is a servant, they have a meal together.

As they're having the meal, then he institutes the Lord's supper, which he says that we are supposed to partake of until he returns Right.

And then, as he's doing that, as he's concluding the communion, he says one of you will betray me.

And then he specifically says that Judas is the one that's going to betray him.

And Jesus had just washed his feet a few minutes earlier.

Can you imagine the heart of God to wash the feet of your betrayer?

And yet Jesus.

And then Jesus says to Judas go and do what Satan has already entered you to do.

And then he turns to Peter and says Peter, you're going to deny me.

Three times before the rooster crows and Peter was like you're right, God, jesus, you're right, right?

Is that what he said?

He said absolutely not.

I will die for you.

What he meant was I will die fighting for you.

He didn't mean I will give up my life for you at that point.

Now we know, reading the rest of the Bible, that things got good with Peter, and Peter ended up living his life sacrificially for the Lord.

And he ended up giving his life, ultimately sacrificially, being crucified, and asking, requesting that he be crucified upside down, so that he would not didn't feel like he was worthy to be crucified in the same manner as our Lord, jesus Christ.

So here you have this backdrop of all of this stuff going on.

In John 14.6, right before the passage I just read Jesus gives one of the greatest revelations of who he is in all of the Bible.

He says I am what, the way, the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

Let's not forget.

Why did Jesus come to this earth?

He came to this earth in order for us to be restored, to write, to have an opportunity to be restored, to write relationship with His heavenly Father, amen.

But now he turns the tables on His disciples and he begins to talk about something they weren't quite prepared for.

He's going to leave them.

He's going to leave them.

And what were they thinking in their Jewish minds?

And what were they thinking?

What were the people that were around them thinking was going to occur?

They were thinking that the Messiah was going to destroy Rome, eradicate them from their kingdom, and that he was going to reestablish the throne of His Father, david, in Jerusalem and he was going to rule and reign forever and ever and ever.

And Peter and the rest of the guys were all for that.

And how many of you know, there will be a time and there will be a day when Jesus will return to the earth and he will literally rule and reign as King of Kings and Lord of Lords forever and ever and ever.

So those things are true and they will come to pass.

But His first coming was not about that, yet what was it about?

It was about bringing redemption.

It was about bringing a plan and instituting a plan whereby we could have our relationship with God restored, and also so that he could send Holy Spirit into the earth to live among us and to dwell in us.

So he says I'm going to leave you, but don't worry, I'm going to send you something that's great, you're going to love it.

So let's look at this passage and talk about what Jesus is teaching his disciples about the Holy Spirit.

Now, when you talk about Holy Spirit, I interchange so you can use the article, the, because the Bible uses that in a lot of places, so it says the Holy Spirit.

I like sometimes, when I'm talking about Holy Spirit, to move the, loose, the, the.

And why do you think I do that?

Because a lot of times when people think about the Holy Spirit they think about something like Star Wars May the force be with you or you know some kind of mystical, you know entity out here, some kind of being Casper the friendly ghost or something like this.

He's much more than that.

He feels things deeply, he can be moved with compassion, he can be grieved, he thinks, he discerns, he teaches, he considers, he reasons.

He has all of these elements about him that are not other world right, even though he is a supernatural being OK, so really important for us.

You can refer to it either way.

But sometimes when I lose the article is because I'm reminding myself that this is not just a, this is not an aberration, this is just a mark.

The Holy Spirit is just as much a part of the Trinity as God the Father and God the Son, and that's the way that God intended it.

It's not our plan, it's his plan, right.

So in his dialogue with his disciples, the first thing he's instituting and teaching them is the Holy Spirit is God.

You'll notice the spirit is capitalized S in many translation the spirit of truth, the spirit, the Holy Spirit, even.

They weren't being promised.

These disciples weren't being promised a lesser version of God.

This was someone who was equal to Jesus in every way, and we know that.

Almighty God reveals himself as one being eternally existent in three persons.

We don't understand the mystery of that fully and I don't think we need to.

There are some things that God leaves us.

What's the right?

What's the right word?

We are aware of our own inability to totally comprehend and understand who God is, and that's okay.

It's okay, right.

He shows us who he is in the ways that we need to know and comprehend and understand.

So the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and this is something to remember.

The Trinity is dynamic and unified in purpose.

They always keep in step with one another to bring about their purpose.

There's never been a time in all of eternity that God the Father looked at God the Son and they were thinking different thoughts, or that the Holy Spirit spoke up and said ah, I don't think that's a great idea.

They've always been unified in purpose, in direction, in action.

Maybe their apparatus or their way of doing something may look different.

We can look at this in the way that they've worked together in the past.

They worked together in creation.

Genesis, chapter one, verses one through three, says 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.

And God said let there be light.

And there was light.

So you have God, the Father, kind of, as the architect of the creation, and Jesus Christ.

When it says and God said, let there be light, john one brings us into the light on what that is.

Jesus is the word of God.

So when the word was spoken let there be light Jesus was that word and the Holy Spirit was waiting.

He's like the builder he was waiting for the word to be spoken so that he could perform it, so that he could cause it to come to pass.

So when God said let there be light, there was light.

They also work together in salvation.

You can see this in John three.

The Father sends the son, the son does the work of redemption, the spirit draws, saves, transforms and keeps us, and they work together in mission.

There's a beautiful story in Isaiah, chapter six.

Isaiah, who is already being used to speak the word of God, is now encountered with this vision of heaven where he sees God seated on the throne.

And what does he do?

Does he run up and jump in his lap and say and rub his belly and say I want a new Honda?

No, no, of course it wouldn't have.

That would have been very prophetic at the time, right, no Hondas around back then, but anyway.

So now we fell on his face as one dead in the presence of a holy God, and he said I'm a man undone, unclean, my lips are unclean, even though he's already spoken for God.

He's recognizing his own inability, his own sin.

And the Bible says that an angel took a tongue and grabbed a burning coal out of the incense altar that's in heaven and he placed that coal on Isaiah's lips and he said to him now you've been made pure.

And during that whole occasion the Trinity is speaking together and they say we need somebody to go as a messenger who will go for us Father, son and spirit.

And Isaiah goes forth and of course, we know he was used of God to speak.

The majority of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah Amazing stuff.

So they work together in mission.

The second thing that I believe that Jesus is trying to bring across to his followers is that he's a very present helper.

He's a very present helper.

How many of you would acknowledge this morning that we need some help?

We need some help on a daily basis?

I know that I do.

And Jesus understood, much more succinctly especially, that these very same disciples that he was talking to were, in the days and weeks ahead, going to encounter the greatest persecution that they could ever imagine in their entire lives.

And he knew that they weren't yet ready for it, but they were going to be made ready for it.

Why?

Because he was going to send the Holy Spirit, who was going to be their helper, their advocate, their strength when they were weak, their encouragement when they needed encouragement, their joy when they were filled with sorrow, their laughter when they only had tears and could find tears.

The Holy Spirit is a gift from God and he is a great helper.

He leads us and guides us.

He's an advocate for us.

The words that the Scripture used to describe the work of the Holy Spirit are personal words, very personal.

He cares.

This is a person who interacts with us.

The last thing is Holy Spirit reveals Jesus.

The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus.

Holy Spirit isn't here with his own agenda.

He's not like saying, okay, father and son are away, so now I'm going to get to do my thing.

No, he is the spirit of Christ that's in the earth.

He is continuing the work that Jesus began.

Oh, not when he came from the incarnation, but before the foundation of the world.

The plan of action that's being carried out in 2024 is not an adjustment based on man's failure.

The plan being carried out in 2024 is the plan that was created before the foundation of the world, and there's one God that's in charge and there's three ways that he expresses himself Father, son and spirit.

Isn't it interesting that Jesus said that he came to reveal what the Father?

Jesus came to this earth to reveal the Father.

But what does the Holy Spirit do?

He came to reveal Jesus.

Isn't that awesome?

They all are so caught up in each other.

They can't help but talk about the other one and bless the other one and glorify the other one.

That's what they're here to do.

The Holy Spirit is here to guide us, lead us, reveal us, reveal to us who Jesus is.

Any truth that we come to know about Jesus Christ we come to know only through the active revelation of the Holy Spirit.

That's the only way that we ever know any truth that we believe about God.

It's through the active revelation of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and it is the active work of the Holy Spirit that should be the normal experience for every believer in Jesus.

It should be normal for us to experience the active work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

He's not a foreign entity to believers in Jesus Christ.

It should be normal.

Now you're thinking in your head.

I've seen a lot of things that don't seem very normal.

You could list a lot of things, and I've been in the kingdom now for 48 years, 49 years, 47, whatever it is, over 40, right, and I have been through.

I've been through the healing movement, I've been through the Jesus movement, I've been through the charismatic movement, I've been through the grace movement.

I've been through huh, oh yeah, the laughing.

I don't even know what to call that movement.

Ha, ha ha ha.

Whatever, I've seen all of those things and I've seen the good and I've seen a lot of stuff that was flesh, that was called the spirit of God.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right, just because the bathwater was bad.

Let's not divorce ourselves from the truth that makes us free, that gives us life.

God wants to encounter us, and the way he chooses to do it is through the Holy Spirit.

That's his principle way.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

All right, you pulled it out of me, okay, so let's look at three caricatures real quick.

Now, what is a caricature?

A caricature is not very Cochran.

Good to see you, my friend.

Let's welcome Barry here.

And Kim.

Yeah, yeah, amen.

Barry's living.

Barry's a living miracle and God is in the process of healing him.

He's been through a process over the last several months and we're just so grateful to see what God's doing in Barry's life.

Great to have you and Kim with us this morning.

And then sorry, I don't like to do that and embarrass people too much, but I just saw you back there and I thought, wow, that's awesome.

That's one of the things I was so excited about being in the hospital as long as I was in 2020 was getting back to church, getting back to fellowshiping with believers and because, man, I just missed it.

I missed the life that is a part of being together in a corporate setting like this, focusing in on Jesus.

So the caricature so caricature is not saying something that isn't true.

It's a drawing or an image that takes something that is true and then expounds on it, magnifies it.

So I was gonna have the media team put a picture up of me with bulging biceps, with bulging biceps and I do have bulging biceps.

They just this guy.

You know I'm gonna so anyway.

So there's some truth in that, but it would be rapidly amplified.

It would be very much amplified, right, it would be a caricature.

And so I wanna talk about the caricatures that sometimes we get in our heads concerning Holy Spirit that limit us from understanding really his primary thought and purpose in the earth.

Okay, so the first one is that the Holy Spirit is essentially power.

The Holy Spirit is essentially power.

He's a force of power.

Okay, now, is the Holy Spirit powerful, yes or no?

Do we want the power of the Holy Spirit involved in our lives?

I'm not.

Are you sure it's not a true question?

Do we want the power of the yes.

Yes, we need the power of Holy Spirit, actively engaged and involved in our lives, healing miracles, deliverance signs and wonders.

We desperately want these things occurring on a regular basis, not just within the four walls of this church, but in our offices, in the cubicles, in grocery stores, at Walmart, family gatherings.

We want these types of things occurring because we believe that God wants to encounter people, jesus' disciples.

If anybody on the planet could understand power encounters, it's these disciples.

They'd seen Jesus open blind eyes and deaf ears.

They'd seen him cast spirits out of people and people be raised from the dead.

They themselves had laid hands on people and seen them healed and seen miracles performed.

They saw bread and fish multiply all of the different things that you can think about in Jesus' life and ministry.

Jesus is powerful and he hasn't stopped exercising his power just because the Holy Spirit has come and he's here.

The Holy Spirit carries the power of God with him.

Okay, just a quick story, and I've told this before, but it's been a long time.

When I was a kid, my family used to go to the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, which was just north of us where we lived in Wyoming, and we've administered there a lot.

We became friends with the people there.

My best friend growing up was a Native American man named CT Waukes-On-Ice that was his name and we went back a few years ago and got to reconnect with him and watch him dance.

It's an amazing the culture don't get me started on the culture.

It's just an amazing thing to see aspects of history right Carried out even in today's world.

So here we have these people and we would go up, my family would go up and minister to them and on occasion we had this big tent meeting and we were staying there for several days out in the middle of nowhere.

If you've never been to Montana, you can go anywhere and be nowhere, if you know what I'm saying.

There's a lot of wide open spaces.

There are people infringing upon that wide open space, but for the most part there are a lot of places where you can go and have not a lot of people there.

So we were there and it was a tremendous experience, very a culture rating, in the sense that they killed a buffalo.

The Native Americans killed a buffalo to eat over the week and they put it in the stream to keep it cool because it was in the middle of the summer, and they would also wash their clothes in the stream and bathe in the stream, and then we would cut pieces of buffalo and cook the buffalo and eat the buffalo.

So it was, for a young white kid who never experienced anything like that, it was a pretty amazing thing.

But God was so faithful during that time and he moved mightily, saving people, healing people.

A lot of miracles happening and one night in particular we heard in the distance of Siren and we were in the middle of nowhere Again, this was not somewhere you would find accidentally and the Siren came closer and closer and then we saw the flashing lights and there were police cars that were escorting an ambulance.

The ambulance backs up to the tent and the doors open and on a gurney there's a man who's brought on a gurney out into the tent, to the middle of the tent where my dad was standing preaching, and when the crowd saw who this man was, there was a gasp in the crowd.

We did not know it, but this man was the chief of the Groningen Nation and he was near death.

He had emphysema very badly.

He was wearing oxygen.

In fact.

He was in the hospital getting ready to die.

He found out about this meeting that was happening and he told the doctors.

He did not ask them, but he told them that he needed to go there, and so they brought him there and he came up to my dad and, with his weakness and frailty, somehow he communicated to my dad and he said this if your God is real, heal me.

My dad looked at us, we looked at him and he just did one of these, which we all knew was in every language, is what we need to pray.

We need to pray, and I'm here to tell you that my dad laid hands on that man and all of us around him and we began to pray and the spirit of God entered that place and entered that man's body and completely healed him.

He ripped his oxygen off, he got up off of the gurney on his own.

Of course, all of his people are around trying to thinking he was hallucinating or something.

And to prove them wrong, he began to run around the inside of that tent and everybody, of course, is either on their face before God or rejoicing, crying.

And he runs up and he grabs the mic and my dad's like what are you gonna say to the chief?

And he grabs the mic and he starts singing.

The only words to any Christian song that he knew is the first verse of Amazing Grace, and we probably sang it 20 times as he led the congregation singing Amazing Grace, holy Spirit is powerful.

Do we need more of the power of the Holy Spirit?

Absolutely, but is it all that?

He is no, and if we find ourselves thinking of him only in those terms, we're missing out.

We're missing out Acts 1-8,.

Jesus said to his disciples you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

You will be witnesses in Jerusalem, judea, in Sumeria and to the end of the earth.

The New Testament clearly teaches that power is available for this life, for this life.

But we don't wanna be distorted in thinking that that's all.

Holy Spirit is Okay.

The second one Holy Spirit is primarily focused on performance.

What does that mean?

The gifts how many of you have been around churches that the majority of their experience with Holy Spirit was the exercising of spiritual gifts?

So prophecy, discerning of spirits, words of knowledge, words of wisdom, tongues and interpretation of tongues, and everybody was kind of classified within the church based on their particular ability to express whatever gifts.

They were Right Again, are the gifts of the Spirit real.

They're called that, my God, the gifts of the Spirit.

He introduces those to us as these being from Him.

So we understand that these are real.

We need more of them, not less of them.

More of them, not less of them.

Okay, it is our job as church leaders to equip you, as the church, to use the gifts that God's given you to be a blessing to the world around you.

And that's there's Romans 12 gifts.

There's Ephesians 4 gifts.

There's 1 Corinthians 12 gifts.

There's all kinds of gifts found in all of the scriptures that God can use us in a multitude of ways to be a blessing to others.

The problem is not with the gifts.

It's when a church focuses on the gifts alone and again the ranking system happens.

The Corinthian church that Paul wrote to in 1 Corinthians was exclusively, was almost exclusively, focused on the gifts of the Spirit.

The result was that they had become proud and arrogant and remained unspiritual.

They were spiritually immature.

The other thing that's worse than all of it 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that they weren't doing it out of love.

In fact, it says that you can have all the gifts in the world and sound like a like.

I wish I could like a gong, a loud noise, a crashing symbol.

A crashing symbol.

Do we love looking into God's face or into His hand?

We have, unfortunately, even recently, become aware again of those who we have considered to be great in the faith and the sense, that have had tremendous impact in the kingdom of God and have focused on things of the Spirit, and especially in the area of the gifts, and find themselves unfortunately in a compromised position from a character standpoint.

My friends, character matters.

The gifts are absolutely essential, but character matters most.

So if it's not just the gifts and it's not performance, what about a third one?

The Holy Spirit is mostly interested in purity.

Now I'm going to give you a huge clue here.

What is the first name of the entity that we're talking about?

So is he about purity?

It's in his name.

So Holy Spirit absolutely is about purity.

We need we need a greater level of purity and holiness and fruit than we've ever experienced before.

Galatians five should be on our lips just as much as 1 Corinthians, 12.

The fruit of the Spirit is our little two year old Emma is quoting Galatians five, 22 and 23.

I don't know that girl.

I don't know.

I could go on and on.

I'll stop because I don't want to get into the wrestling match.

I know all of yours are sweet and special and very smart as well.

Okay, let's put them all into that Christian sport thing where they don't keep score and they'll just be anyway.

This is obviously a biblical example.

Holiness and fruit, not just the power or gifts.

Jesus would go on in John 16 to say that the Holy Spirit would come to convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.

He cleanses us from the penalty of sin by justification.

The Holy Spirit is the agent of salvation.

Because of the work that Jesus did on the cross, he can make us pure and white, just like we've never sinned.

Holy Spirit also is active in the act of regeneration.

None of us of our own will have decided to follow after God.

God put it in our hearts.

Because of the work of the Holy Spirit, it's called regeneration.

And so when we are made alive and to God at the point of salvation and the pattern of sin through sanctification, how many of you are still in that process?

If you're not, please come up for prayer at the end, because we need you to know.

We need to speak a word of truth over you.

You are in the process of sanctification.

That is where God brings things to the surface and says to us deal with it.

How many of you know, we have a cooperative effort in that.

Amen.

All of these are works of the Spirit and found in 1 Corinthians 611.

It says it succinctly and such were some of you.

But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God.

The main problem, when people focus only on purity as the Holy Spirit and make that their caricature, is they very easily become legalistic.

So unless you speak in tongues a certain way, at a certain volume, or unless you worship in a way that is, you know big enough, or unless you read enough of scripture, or unless you wear your hair a certain way or dress a certain way, or whatever it is, we become, we can be purified, we become, we can become legalistic if we only think of Holy Spirit from a purity standpoint.

Is he pure?

Does he want purity?

Absolutely, but is that all?

I would say no.

I would say there's more and I would say that we've maybe missed out on one of the primary focuses of the Holy Spirit, and that's what we want to end on this morning.

The truest passion of the Spirit is encountering presence.

Encountering presence as important as power, as important as performance and as important as purity are.

God wants us to experience him.

He wants to encounter us with his presence.

The Spirit's main task is to make known the personal presence of the Christ of history in and with the believer and the church.

That's his job, that's his heart.

That's what he wants more than anything.

How was this expressed in in in scripture?

Well, first of all, how many of you have experienced and encountered the presence of God in such a way that the only thing that you could find yourself doing is to worship him?

Did you guys know that we spend as leaders, we spend a lot of time praying for you as individuals, as families and as this congregation, that you will experience God for yourself?

That is one of the deepest cries of our heart.

Sometimes you'll see me looking around during worship and maybe I'll catch your eye.

I am not looking around in order to count numbers or to try to judge you.

What I'm trying to see is if you're in count, if God is encountering you in such a way that it's showing up in your life through worship.

This is a place, a safe place for you to encounter God.

We want that for you.

How is this expressed in scripture?

Often the phrase the Lord was with someone.

Joseph was in the palace, he was in the prison, he was in the pit, he was in Potiphar's house and in all of those places it says the Lord was with him.

Moses was nervous about going back to Egypt, and what did God say?

Tell them I am is with you, and Jesus himself, before he would lift off of this planet, would look at these same disciples that we're reading about in John 14 and say these words I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Can you think of one advantage that the Holy Spirit would have over Jesus?

And I'm not talking about from a competition standpoint.

There's no competition between them.

But what advantage does the Holy Spirit have over Jesus, the incarnate one, the one who came as flesh and bone?

Jesus could be among people, he could be with people, but the Holy Spirit can be in people, he can be in all of us who are believers at the same time.

How does that happen?

I don't know.

I don't, I can't comprehend it.

I don't understand it.

I can't pretend to be able to explain it to you, but it's true.

Jesus himself, at the end of the saying you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

In Romans eight we read if the same spirit that raised Christ Jesus from the dead dwells in you, dwells in you the spirit of God.

If you are a follower of Jesus, the spirit of God is living on the inside of you, wanting to give you daily encounters with him.

You don't have to wait from Sunday to Sunday or from Wednesday to Wednesday.

You could have an encounter with God in the car, washing dishes, at the airport, at Walmart, fishing.

How many of us, as men, have had encounters with God while fishing or doing something that's totally mindless?

That's sometimes the key.

Not that we need to get rid of our mind and understand the spirit, but sometimes we need to still our minds, be still and know.

In doing so, in pouring out the spirit of God so that he would dwell in us, the ministry of Jesus would continue on in the hearts of every man and woman who the Lord, our God, would call.

He would lead them in all truth, while always reminding them of what Jesus had taught them, although we weren't present during Jesus's earthly ministry.

The Holy Spirit was.

He was there and his ministry is a continuation of that which began in Galilee, in the here and now.

The ministry of Jesus is not finished yet, and the Holy Spirit has created millions of followers that are carrying forth the ministry of Jesus here in this earth.

Come on.

Jesus, in his concluding thoughts in John 16, in the same talk with his disciples, says when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine Jesus is saying and declare it to you.

All that the Father has is mine.

Therefore, I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

What did Jesus mean by taking all that is mine and declaring it to you?

The work of the spirit, everything that is real and true about Jesus as God in the flesh, as the Lord of creation, as the providential one, as the one full of grace and mercy, as the world's rightful Lord, as the one who actually is master of all things, whether or not men acknowledge him or not.

All that is real and true about Jesus as our divine lover, our mediator, our guarantor in the new covenant, our prophet, priest and king, our savior from the guilt and power of sin and from the world's corruptions and the devil's clutches.

The spirit has come to show us all that is true of Jesus as our shepherd, husband, friend, our life, our hope, our author and finisher of our faith, the Lord of our own personal history, the one who will someday bring us to be with him and rule and reign with him, to share in his glory.

That is who Holy Spirit is, and some of us, including myself, need to shake some things off because we've grown content without true, changing, transformative, real, nothing made up or pretend or fake, but real encounters with the living God.

God never intended for us to live this life without truly encountering the Holy Spirit.

I'm not here to pretend to tell you what that looks like for you, because God is so specific and he's not formulaic.

It's not like he's saying, okay, this is what I'm going to do in you and I'm going to do it in everybody.

Sometimes he does that, but very rarely most of the time, even in Jesus' ministry.

He very rarely healed the same illness the same way twice.

Why?

Because he's a personal God and he moves in us and on us and upon us and through us in ways that mean something to us, that make a difference in our lives, that are personalized to our own journey, where we're at, in our place and our walk with Him.

But the problem is, if we never give Him the time, if we never get still enough, if we never expect that he wants to encounter us, we miss it.

Every Christ follower should be educated, equipped and expectant regarding the work of Holy Spirit in their lives and within the body of Christ.

I'm going to finish with one last story.

There was a young lady nine years old that was a part of our church that we planted in North Carolina years ago.

Our church was meeting in a bank building.

We had a space that was about to be built.

We had a space right here.

You guys were the church.

That was it.

There was no stage, so we were just on the ground.

We had one amplifier and the amplifier had three inputs we could plug in the keyboard and two microphones.

That was it.

It was just one little square speaker amplifier.

Thankfully, god had brought somebody into our church that played the keyboard.

They played the keyboard and I was learning how to lead praise and worship and my wife was singing backup vocals with me.

She would normally hold the mic right here.

If I could go back, I wish that somebody had videotaped.

I don't know, actually, I don't.

There are some things that are better left in the past.

We were so thankful for this man.

He was a great man.

He was a great man One of the things that came with this man.

We had a family and he had a daughter named Jessica, who was about nine years old.

She had autism.

She couldn't really carry on a conversation very well.

The other thing is that she was just very active.

You can imagine this is the church.

This little spot right here is where we're leading worship.

This little Jessica would want to play the keyboard with her dad, or she would want to grab the microphone and help me sing, which, honestly, that might have been a godsend.

Or she would want to jump around or dance around, or she would scream out or whatever the case.

Was Anybody over the age of 37 in the room.

We're very distracted by Jessica and wished can we be honest wished that Jessica would just be still or move away.

I heard about it a lot.

I was one of the pastors of the church.

What are you going to do about this?

Well, I don't know what to do.

We love her.

We love her family.

They're her parents.

I'm sure you can imagine that Jessica has this inability to connect the dots completely on everything.

It's not her fault, none of that's her fault.

I'm here to tell you.

There was an experience that we had on a Sunday morning where Jessica got quiet.

She was still standing up front, but this time she was facing away from the crowd, she was looking at the corner of the room and then she began to look upward.

That little nine-year-old girl's mouth came words like I see you Jesus, I love you Jesus, I love you Jesus, thank you, jesus.

And all of those in the crowd who had previously been so calloused and judgmental and critical of this little girl, who was such a nonsense in so many ways, couldn't help but be moved by what Jesus was doing for this special low girl.

There was no room for somebody to run up there and grab a hold of her, to remove her from the scene.

There was no action to be done.

It was all the music silenced, everyone was completely silent, and Jessica had a moment with the Savior, and so did all of us.

I was changed on that day.

Something within me changed, even though I wasn't the one being encountered by God or was I Thinking back on it?

Maybe I was.

My friends, we never want to pretend, fake, manufacture or do anything that is outside of God's purpose, but we do need to shake off some dust.

Somebody told me this morning gave me an image of a dog coming out of the water, and if you've ever seen a dog come out of the water and begin to shake off, they started their snout and they ended the end of their tippy tail and they shake it all out.

In 2024, we have an opportunity to shake off some things, to shake out some things and to begin to become expectant again, to have encounters with God ourselves first, within our own family dynamics, in our workplaces and even at church.

Are you with me?

Let's pray, father, god, we are just so appreciative of your reminders to us.

I confess, lord, it's so easy to become distracted by even good things and that we forget the most important things, and that is to sit at your feet and worship you, lord, to encounter you as you speak truth to us and prepare us for what is to come and heal us from the brokenness of past failures and mistakes.

Lord, I just pray in Jesus' name that today would be a day of new beginnings in our relationship with Holy Spirit.

Lord, I pray for those that might be here listening to this message online who are not yet followers of Jesus Christ.

I pray that today would be the day that they would choose this day to serve the Lord Jesus, to repent of their sins, to turn away from their old way of living and to believe on the Lord Jesus, christ and his sacrifice and to be saved and to receive the Holy Spirit and their lives to be baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ.

Would you just stand to your feet with me and let's ask for a fresh encounter and filling this morning and let's extend our faith.

Some of you, some of us, are really needing this.

So, father, god, we, just as an exercise of faith, we reach out to you, lord Jesus, and we ask that you would fill us again with your spirit.

In Jesus' name, from the top of our head to the soles of our feet, lord, we ask you for divine encounter.

In the name of Jesus Christ.

We pray, Lord God, that you would help us to shake off all of the peripheral stuff that really doesn't have any importance from an eternal perspective.

Father, help us to focus in on you, to place all of our attention and our focus and our gaze and our attention on you.

Lord God, the author and finisher of our faith, thank you that you've given us your spirit, the spirit of Christ, to show us who you are.

Father, I pray now, in the name of Jesus, for daily encounters, for each of us with you.

We pray, father, god, that we would have moments where you would speak clearly to us, where we would hear your voice, and that we would not listen to the voice of a stranger or the voice of our own flesh.

Lord, help us to hear you, help us to experience you in ways that are tangible and real and life-changing, and not forced or fabricated.

But also, lord, help us to be open to something that maybe may look different than our former experiences with you.

Now, just between you and God, just begin to talk to Him about this area of your life and just let Him know, from your own words what it is that you want from Him.

Jesus, we pray.

Pour out your spirit on us, lord, god, change us God, jesus, god, change us God, change us God.

I'm going to ask that the prayer team members would come now to the front and I'm not going to dismiss in a regular way this morning.

I'm just going to ask that, if you would like somebody to pray with you, we want to open this up right now and give you a chance.

Maybe you just need some help recognizing the encounter of the Holy Spirit in your life.

Maybe you are in a place where you have your hurt, you're feeling hurt from you, have wounds from the past, even church hurt or whatever the case might be, and you just need some help this morning.

Yeah, if you all can just come down, just the prayer team, whoever is ready to pray this morning come on down and just ask you to be obedient to the Lord.

And if you want to be obedient to the Lord, you can just come down and just ask you to be obedient to the Lord.

So just take the essence of this morning with you this week and let's live a life of encounter with God, and we're going to come back.

We're going to be talking more about this in the weeks to come, and we also will dive into the other words that we feel like the Lord's speaking, but I really feel that this is a significant word for us, a reminder to us.

It's nothing new, but it's a reminder to us of where our focus needs to be right.

So I pray a blessing on you in the name of Jesus, amen.

So please come for prayer if you need it.

Thank you for being here this week.

We will be instituting something in the coming weeks that I want to just quickly share with you.

We're going to be dedicating a zone in the back of the sanctuary, along this back wall, for prayer time during worship, and we're going to be having some of our elders and elders' wives back there, and also some of the altar prayer team will be where I talked with Tom, and we're going to be working together with that group, and because sometimes it seems like that during times of singing songs of praise and worship, that God begins to move in a person's life and they become more open to what Not more open, more aware of something that God's wanting to do, and so we want to create venues for that, and so one of the things that we'll be doing in the weeks to come is we're going to just dedicate that back wall.

So we're going to ask there not be any talking or chatting back there in the back.

We just want to leave that.

It used to be that you'd bring everybody forward.

We don't want to just do that in order to do it.

There's actually a lot more space in the back for one thing, and the other thing is we want this to be personal.

If God is moving on an individual during a service, we want to be able to be a part of that and helping in that process.

Okay, so that's something we're going to be doing.

We're also going to be doing some encounter services this year where we're going to be coming together, praising and worshiping God and asking God to move in all of the ways that we talked about and more Via the work of the Holy Spirit.

So be looking for that.

And, most of all, the last thing is that we're praying that you will have daily encounters with the God of the universe, because that is what's going to give us everything that we need to not only make it through this year, but to thrive in the middle of whatever it is that's going to come.

Amen, god bless you guys have a great week.