Spirit Comes, Church Goes

Wow, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Oh, please be seated.

You're too kind.

I haven't said anything yet.

I am so honored, so humbled, and so excited to be here with you for this day and for the conference that is about to happen.

And um, you know, at this wonderful, amazing church that has impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands, myself included, all over the world.

So thank you so much for having me.

Thank you to Pastor Robert and to the whole pastoral staff for believing in me and trusting me to share the word with you this morning.

Well, as you heard, my name is Joachim, and I'm fully aware that that's a very hard name to pronounce in English.

So uh, but let me just give you um kind of kind of an idea.

Imagine a rapper would greet the North Korean dictator, Yo Kim.

That's that will give you get you in the vicinity of it, or you can just kind of do the easy thing and call me Pastor.

You're welcome.

And and I will say thank you, and and there we go.

I'm very happy to be here today with my beautiful wife Maria.

Would you stand up, honey?

We've been uh married, best friends, and road companions for 32 years now.

God has blessed us with two amazing daughters, Evelina 29 and Julia 26, both involved in the ministry and serving the Lord.

And Julia got married five years ago, and now she has two boys, so that makes me a grandfather.

And uh it's a bit funny and ironically, from a biblical point of view, because the the one with the hair, that's Zion, and the one with absolutely no hair whatsoever, that's Samson.

So, and as you heard, we are serving the Lord by pastoring our our our uh church that we love so much called Word of Life in Sweden.

Now, Sweden is a frozen nation far, far away from here, a nation of eternal winter governed by two princesses called Elsa and Anna.

And uh we have a prime minister called Olof.

And and if you haven't heard of them, maybe you've heard our national anthem is called Mamma Mia.

So, but honestly, we're so thankful to God because from this small nation, one of the most secularized in the world, one of the most socialistic in the world, we have been able to, by the grace of God, plant 700 churches all over the Soviet Union, Central Asia, Middle East, Russia, and India.

So we just thank God for his grace.

Please join us in Sweden.

It would be great to have uh some people from Dallas over to our cold nation.

Just don't come in the winter months because you would die.

And and we we don't want that to happen.

If you brought your Bibles today, would you please look uh up Acts chapter two?

And I'm gonna start off there.

My message today I called Spirit comes, church goes.

Spirit comes, church goes.

And we're gonna read the first few verses from Acts chapter two, the story of the day of Pentecost.

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.

Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole place where they were sitting.

They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit enabled them.

Now, they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven, and when they heard this sound, the crowd came together in bewilderment, because each of each one heard their own language being spoken.

Amen.

You know, I read this passage of scripture so many times, and of course, assuming that this thing that is going on on the day of Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise that Christ made in the previous chapter.

When the Spirit comes upon you, you will receive power and be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.

But then the other year, as I read these verses again, I realized, hmm, there's one more thing going on here.

The Spirit seems to be doing not only one thing, but actually two things on the day of Pentecost.

He's stirring boldness and courage in his baby church to fulfill the Great Commission.

But he's also stirring curiosity in the people on the street.

It seems he's preparing one group to share, and at the same time, he's preparing another group to receive.

He's preparing one group to speak, and at the same time preparing another group to listen.

You could say that on the day of Pentecost, the Spirit is writing a big exclamation mark above his church, but at the same time also writing a big question mark over the world.

And actually, we started to teach that in our church, and as we come together on a day like this, worshiping the Lord and encountering his presence, we believe that at the same time that there will be a father or a daughter or a neighbor or a friend or a colleague, someone out there in this city whose hearts are being prepared to receive the gospel that you are being prepared to share.

Because the Spirit does both things at the same time.

Now, let me tell you a story about uh this guy from back home.

He was a 25-year-old Muslim immigrant, and he ended up in Sweden.

He came from the Middle East to Sweden, sorry.

Um now trying to make a life in this very cold nation.

He ended up in a city about one hour north of where we are.

And uh last summer he had a very confusing experience.

He had the same dream every single night as he was sleeping.

In his dream, he saw this big auditorium where thousands of people were standing like this.

Now, this guy has never been to a church, had no idea about Christianity, and couldn't relate to what was going on.

Why did he keep seeing this auditorium?

And why were the people standing like this?

So he got out on the streets of the Swedish city and started to ask people randomly, excuse me, do you know of a big auditorium where thousands of people stand like this?

People of Dallas, Texas, you should you need to know Swedes don't talk to one another, okay?

We are socially invalids compared to you guys.

We go into a store here and do some shopping.

There will be someone asking, saying, Hi, how are you doing?

What can I do for you?

Where are you from?

What brought you here?

Have a nice day, all that thing.

If you walk into a store in Sweden, nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

So this guy didn't get any answers whatsoever.

So we started thinking, well, the the auditorium that appears in my dreams is a big place.

So probably it's in the capital of Sweden, which is Stockholm, by the way.

So he got on a train to go to Stockholm to find this mysterious auditorium where thousands of people stand like this.

As you go from his city to Stockholm, the the last place you stop by, the last city before Stockholm is our city, Uppsala.

So we passed our city, went to Stockholm, arrived at the platform, got out of the train, and there's a guy standing there.

Now, this young Muslim has never seen this guy before, but this guy was walks straight up to him and says, Hey man, you went one station too far.

You need to go back one station.

So this Muslim says, Uh, thank you.

And he goes back on the train and he goes back one station to our city.

And he got gets out of the train, walks up to the first person he sees, and asks, Excuse me, do you know of a big auditorium where thousands of people stand like this?

And this guy says, That's word of life church.

Everybody knows that.

So he gets directions to our church.

This is a Saturday night, our Saturday night service is going on.

He steps into the church the first time this young man has ever been to a church.

As he steps into the auditorium, he recognizes the auditorium in detail.

He recognized the balconies, the color schemes, the stage, and the thousands of people standing like this, worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the first thing he hears as he enters, the first thing he hears as he enters is me giving the altar call.

Maybe you're here tonight and you don't know Jesus.

He hears the gospel, he lifts his hand and he accepts Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

Can we make some noise in church?

And to me, this speaks volumes as the efforts God is ready to make to just have one more soul come within the reach of the gospel.

He would give someone a dream and put it on repeat.

He would place an angel on the Stockholm train station and he will make sure that this guy comes within the reach of the gospel.

Truly, God prepares us to speak, but he also preparing the world to listen.

Can we say amen?

Now, what is our part to play in this then?

If God prepares us to speak and God prepares the world to listen, what should we do?

What part of the equation is our duty?

Let me give you two things today.

Number one, simply this dare to believe that the Holy Spirit is with you.

Dare to believe that the Holy Spirit is with you.

As I read the words of Jesus, as he announces and introduces the Holy Spirit and the concept of the person of the Holy Spirit to his disciples, I'm amazed at how he starts.

Because the first thing he says to his disciples is not that the Holy Spirit will give you goosebumps and some great emotional experiences.

Although he might.

Which means he's there when you feel his presence, but he's just as much there when you don't.

Because the spirit is not with you because you feel him, he's with you because Jesus promised he would be, and Jesus would never lie.

Amen.

So sometimes in our daily walk with Christ, we simply have to put faith in the fact that Christ is with us.

And if the Holy Spirit is with you, you have everything you need to open your mouth and share the gospel with another person.

And actually, what you might find is that this person is much more prepared to hear than you actually thought from the out coming from the outside.

I was on a plane once, this was a few years ago, and I was going to the Pharaoh Islands.

I'm introducing a lot of uh Scandinavian and European geography here.

Pharaoh Islands is a small group of islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

And I was flying in to preach at a conference over there.

And I was sitting there on board the plane, a fully packed plane, reading my Bible and getting my heart prepared for the messages I was about to share.

Now, next to me was uh a huge man.

Let's call him XXXLarge.

And uh this guy was also as drunk as he was huge, and there were fumes of alcohol coming out of his breath.

And here am I trying to be holy and reading the word of God, and I'm completely, you know, sucked into this horrible breath that comes out of this guy, and because he was drunk, he was also very loud.

And I've already told you about Scandinavian people, they're not that extrovert.

So when somebody's very loud in Scandinavia, everybody everyone else quiets down.

So all the plane was silent, and this guy had a solo performance all to himself, and he was just sitting there sharing with every one of us whatever came into his mind, and we had to listen regardless of whether we wanted to or not.

And um, and at the same time, he was punching me because he was making these big gestures at the same time.

And here am I, sitting here reading my Bible, and have to put up with this guy.

And you might say, Well, Pastor Joachim, holy man of God, I'm sure you prayed for the salvation of his soul.

No, I was praying for God to move him, rather, upgrade him, downgrade him, you know, just whatever grade him, get him off of me.

He's messing with my holiness here.

All of a sudden, we felt the plane starting to turn around.

And the captain came on the speaker saying, ladies and gentlemen, we've just been told there is a storm over the Faroe Islands, and we will not be able to land.

We have to turn the plane around and go back and make another attempt tomorrow morning.

We are sorry for any inconvenience.

And the whole plane went, Oh, that's Swedish people expressing utmost anger and and annoyment and irritation.

That's as far as we go.

So everybody except this guy next to me who starts to scream and yell, No, you need to land this plane right now, man, because I want to see my wife and kids tonight.

And all of a sudden, he looks at me and he looks at my Bible and he looks back at me, and then he says, Man, you better pray right now.

I have to be honest with you, Gateway Church.

I I was taken a bit off guard because I was not in prayer mode.

Do you know what I mean?

I was I was really not there in my thoughts and in my heart, I was more like in irritation and annoyment mode.

But then this sudden, you know, outbursts come and and I have to respond somehow.

And I just said whatever came into my head, and I said, No, I will only pray if you pray with me.

Yeah, and the whole plane went, oh, because you have you have to understand everyone is listening to this conversation now.

So he thought for a while and then he said, This no, I don't believe in God.

Isn't it interesting that he wants me to pray to a God that he does not believe in?

So the plane went, whoa.

And I said, Well, if you don't pray with me, I don't pray either.

And the plane went, oh.

Then he thought for a while and then he said, This if I pray with you, will we be able to land tonight?

Come.

The plane is now dead quiet.

Everybody's waiting.

What will the Bible guy say now?

And at this point, I was searching desperately for some kind of inner confirmation.

Oh, please, God, have a word of God pop up inside of me.

Give me some kind of lightning bulb on the inside that will assure me that if I give this promise that we actually will be able to land, send an angel, Gabriel, Michael, anyone really, and have have it have a divine finger right on the wall.

Yes, Joachim, we will be able to land tonight.

There was nothing, there was no goosebumps, no word, nothing whatsoever.

The only thing I have to had to cling on to was the promise Jesus has made me that the Holy Spirit will be with me always.

He will never leave me nor forsake me.

That was the only one assurance I had at the time.

So I took the deepest breath I've ever taken in my life, and I said, Yes.

If we pray, we will be able to land.

So help me, God.

And the whole plane went, whoa! And this huge drunk guy folded his hands, bowed his head, said, Well, let's pray then.

And I prayed and I prayed for a long time.

And I prayed for this guy's salvation and for his family and everything I could think of, really, just to drag out time.

And then finally I said, And, Lord, I pray in Jesus' name that by your grace we will be able to land tonight.

Please.

Amen.

And he said, Amen.

And the whole plane said, Amen.

No, they didn't do that.

I kid you not.

Five seconds later, the pilot is back on the speaker saying, ladies and gentlemen, we just heard news from the Faroe Islands.

The storm has cleared, and we will be able to land tonight.

Praise God! He's faithful.

He's faithful when we dare to believe.

And please, my brothers and sisters at Gateway, I'm not sharing this story to make me look like some kind of spiritual superman.

Rather, the opposite.

Just want to tell you again and again that sometimes you don't have the emotional experience.

Sometimes you won't have your feelings.

Sometimes you won't have the kind of the outward confirmation, but you will always have the promise of Christ.

The Spirit, the helper, will be with you forever.

And that's basically all we need to dare to believe that He is with us.

Amen.

There's one more thing, one more thing that we can do to connect the supernaturally prepared church with the supernaturally prepared world.

One is dare to believe the Spirit is with you.

The other one is step out of your boat.

Step out of your boat.

And many of us will be familiar with the story from Matthew 14 about Jesus and coming on the Sea of Galilee and his disciples being in this boat.

And there's a conversation with Jesus standing on the sea and Peter being in the boat.

And the conversation ends with Christ saying, Come.

Now, how does this story relate to us?

We live in a different time, we might not have a boat, might not even be a lake around.

But you see, the boat represents our area of security, the area in which we are in full control, the area where we feel safe, and we don't even have to use faith to live here because we know this place.

Peter was a fisherman.

Matthew 4 says he was the son of a fisherman.

He knew the boat.

The boat was his area of security.

And I find it beautiful that as Jesus comes to Peter and as these two meet initially, Jesus steps into the boat of Peter.

He comes to Peter on Peter's terms.

He steps into his area of security.

But further down the road, as the relationship matures, there came this day where Jesus came walking on the water, and he said to Peter, Come, take a new step of faith.

Get out of your safety zone.

Get out of your area of security and where you are in full control.

And let me take you to the next level.

Do something you never done before.

Say something you never said before so you can see something that you've never ever seen before.

Amen.

And I just want to share with you finally about a time, it was only three years ago, where God called our church to take a step out of our boat, out of our comfort zone, and what we saw as a result blew our minds away.

And uh three years ago, as you might be aware of and might remember, global media reported that there was a humanitarian crisis coming to my continent of Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees were coming out of the Middle East, fleeing war, fleeing bloodshed, fleeing the terror of the ISI.

They took to inflatable boats and they got out into the Mediterranean Sea heading for Athens, Greece, to try to find a better life in Europe.

And we all realized what would happen when they got to Athens.

They would walk by foot from the south of Europe to the north, heading for Sweden, my nation, many of them, because we had at the time very little.

Immigration laws.

So we realized within a few weeks' time, hundreds of thousands of refugees would flood into our nation, and we are not prepared for this whatsoever as a nation.

Facing this, I called together my pastors and we started to ask for God's direction in this, how we were gonna position ourselves.

And just let me let me say this to be very clear: I am not making a political statement here.

I do not believe in open borders, I do not agree with my own nation's liberal laws of immigration, and I do realize that accepting all these immigrants also brought truckloads of social problems.

There's no question about that.

But these were our laws, and the people would be coming anyway, whether we wanted to or not, which left us with two choices.

Either we could step out of the situation and complain about it, or we could step into the situation out of our boat, believing that in this crisis there would be a seed of revival.

Because from my perspective, that's what faith is.

Faith does not deny the problem, but faith chooses to see the potential inside the problem.

Faith does not deny the obstacle, but faith chooses to see the opportunity inside the obstacle.

So we gathered all of our churches in the in the eastern part of Europe and we mobilized them.

All of them that was kind of on the way that the refugees would take from Greece up to Sweden, so that these Muslim refugees would walk from one word of life church to another, and they would receive food and health care, and they would receive clothes, but more than anything, they would be told repeatedly that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life.

And as the refugees came to Sweden and to our city of Uppsala, we put a big banner on our church building saying refugees welcome.

And all of a sudden, thousands and thousands of Muslim immigrants flooded into our church.

And we gave them, you know, medical attention, we gave them, we started teaching them how to speak Swedish.

Our businessmen started to teach them about the marketplace in Sweden so they could apply for jobs, so they can be integrated in this new society.

We did whatever we could to help them, but more than anything, we preached the gospel of Jesus to them.

And these people were so confused because the only group that they thought would reject them, the Christians, actually turned out to be the only group who actually embraced them in Sweden.

And we and we told them time and time again, the symbol of our faith is not this, it's this.

So we started to see something very interesting.

As these people heard the gospel, they would come back to us two or three or four days later, and they would say, That Jesus that you told us about, he appeared in our living room.

He shared the same story you shared with us, and he prayed that we would become the sons and the daughters of the living God through his power and his blood.

Now, what do we do?

We saw the miraculous starting to be poured out, and hundreds of former Muslims giving their lives to Jesus Christ.

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.

To this day, 75% of all the people who are saved and baptized in our church are former Muslims giving their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ.

We have to start a new Bible school, a former Muslim Bible school.

And in two and a half years we've been graduating 400 students.

And these guys used to be radical for Islam, now they're radical for Jesus Christ.

These are some of the most committed church members.

I have not I have so many church members called Muhammad, I don't know what to do with them all.

I just pray that God will never call any one of those guys as a prophet, because if anyone would introduce themselves as Prophet Muhammad from World of Life Church, that would be weird.

Also, they can they're Arabic speaking, they don't know how to pronounce my name either.

So the other month I got this t-shirt from them.

Pastor Abdullah Kim.

And little did I know one, two, three years ago, that I would be addressed in that way by hundreds and hundreds of people that are now in our church that five, three, even one year ago used to bow down to another God.

Now they're raising their hands, tears of joy pouring down their face, worshipping the Lamb that will slay.

Thank you, Jesus.

This has also opened up so many doors in the Middle East itself.

Now we're planting churches and starting Bible schools in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq.

This is a picture of me preaching to 10,000 Arab teenagers in the Middle East.

That service was broadcasted live on YouTube, two and a half million people all over the Middle East watching it, thousands of people giving their life to Jesus Christ.

It's a brand new day.

It's a brand new day.

And what used to be a desert is now turning into a beautiful garden.

And just the other Sunday, as we were worshiping, I was looking back at my congregation, and all of a sudden I see it filled with hundreds and hundreds of former Muslims.

Can you imagine?

Hundreds of Muslims praying for Israel every Sunday because every Sunday we bless Jerusalem and we pray for the peace of the holy city.

And they love Israel now, and they bless uh Israel and they're just living their life so crazy and wild for Jesus Christ.

And I just thought to myself as I looked at all these precious people, Jesus died for how easy it would have been for us to miss this opportunity simply by not stepping out of our boats, simply to act more out of fear than out of faith, and simply to sit down in our safety zone.

And I just want to reconnect to your life.

I don't know about your boats, I don't know what God is telling you right now, but maybe there is a person around you somewhere, maybe there's a family member, maybe there is a colleague, maybe there's uh someone in your school, maybe there's a friend or a neighbor that comes up into your minds right now, into your mind right now.

And maybe God is calling you to take a new step in that relationship.

Actually, open your mouth and share something about Jesus, or sharing the love of Jesus.

And I do believe together with you that as you do, there's a miracle ready to happen.

As the supernaturally prepared church meets the world, prepare to listen, God's spirit can do absolutely anything.

Can we say amen in church?

Thank you, Lord.

Before I just pray a prayer or blessing upon you, can I just ask you one thing, my American brothers and sisters?

Would you pray for Europe?

Would you pray for the Middle East?

Because we're seeing a brand new day, a brand new season of the Holy Spirit being poured out, and what was once a desert is turning into a garden where sin abounded grace is now abounding, and where there was darkness, the light is now shining, and the darkness cannot overrun it.

Thank you, Lord.

So please carry us in our prayers.

Would you stand to your feet and I'll just pray a prayer of a blessing over you.

Father, I just thank you for this amazing day that we get to enjoy here in this church and for the conference that is coming, Father.

Now we pray, Holy Spirit, that you will give us the courage to dare to believe that you are with us because that's what Jesus promised us you would be.

Father, we also pray for the grace and the courage to step out of our bodes, our comfort zone, as you calls us to do so.

And as we do, Father, we pray that you will connect the church supernaturally prepared to share and to speak with the world, supernaturally prepared to receive and to listen.

And as those two are connected, Father, may your kingdom expand, may your glory fall for the glory of the name of Jesus Christ and for the growth of the and the expansion of your kingdom.

This we pray in Jesus' mighty name.

Amen.