There is a Snoopy cartoon where charlie Browns baseball game is rained off - the frames show him going to the telephone and having a chat.
When he comes outside his friend Schroeder says -
"The rain has stopped Charlie Brown . What did you do, call the weatherman?"
His answer
No, dial a prayer.
How often have you heard the statement in a movie or in life.
"There is a God."
That is the great catchcry of Pentecost.
There is a God - what is more God is with us.
The disciples of Jesus after his ascension to heaven must have felt utterly deserted and cut off.
Edith Schaeffer speaks of her feelings on the death of her Mother.
I read the paper, with its message that had been phoned from the telegraph office in Lausanne and written down in Liselotte’s handwriting: "Wilmington - 2nd - 9.17 p.m, - Mother fell asleep in Jesus about six - funeral Dr. Laird - love - Father."
The tears flowed suddenly, and my cry was, "Oh, but I wanted to tell her about ... I wanted to write her tomorrow and . . . ."
There it was, the wall of seperation that death puts up against communication! That enemy death. I remembered her face as she waved at the dock in New York. I hadn’t seen her since. It had been six years. But we had had communication, plenty of it, and had been close to our thinking.
It’s the separation that is so hard - the separation of friend from friend in such a "total" way, no way to get through, separation of body from soul. Suddenly the personality has gone.
I had the same feeling yesterday on the Marine Reach ship when I farewelled many young people we had spent the last four months with - you know as you say goodbye that you will never see some of them again.
When Jesus ascended to heaven - I guess the disciples looked at each other and had that after the funeral feeling - now there was this chasm between them and God that, at least in Jesus’ case, could be bridged through prayer but none the less Jesus was in heaven and here they were with their feet placed firmly on the soil of Palestine.
What could they do?
Fortunately for them Jesus had given them some precise instructions.
We can read about that in Acts chapter 1.:4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit."
AC 1:6 So when they met together, they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"
AC 1:7 He said to them: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
Some illustrations Sermon Central.
some masterial I believe in the Church David Watson.
AC 1:9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
Jesus instructed his disciples very clearly to wait of the Gift that God the Father had promised - the gift of the Holy spirit in whom they would be baptised in.
This morning I would like to explore what the scriptures say and demonstrate about why the Holy Spirit is so important to the church and then to ask How we can avail ourselves of this gift ourselves personally.
You might hear of some person who has come into some incredible circumstance where they have inherited a vast fortune - and if you are a gracious kind of person but the truth is if there is nothing in it for you then there is little long term effect on your life
The scriptures make it quite clear that the gift of the Holy Spirit is for believers.
Jesus once said:- JN 16:5 "Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, `Where are you going?’ 6 Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. 7 But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.
In Matthew 29 verse 20 he instructs his followers to baptise those who believe in the name of the Holy Spirit.
As a pastor said to me this week that the Holy Spirit is 1/3 of the God head.
In a general sense Jesus is saying that it is for your good that I am going away, Unless I go away, He says , the counsellor will not come to yu, but if I go, I will send him to you.
In other words Jesus is saying that the Holy Spirit being sent to believers is actually better than Jesus being here with us on earth.
Now you do not need to scan read the gospels for very long before realising that the presence of Jesus on earth was of incredible importance. In our dreams we would see it as fantastic if we could sit on a hillside and listen to the teaching of Jesus - follow his footsteps in jerusalem - Witness the miacles and power of god through him and see how his life has incredible impact on the world around him -
Great as that is -
Jesus himself says - I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.
So Jesus is saying it is better that I go away because God will send the Holy Spirit to you.
We can conclude then that Jesus is saying that this is better and preferable even to him being here.
If that is the case we can only conclude that the presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers - is even better than Jesus being here on earth.
Why then is the Holy Spirit so important to the church?
David Watson says:-
The church was born of the Spirit on the day of pentecost as described in Acts 2. Before that date the disciples had certainly known spiritual fellowship with Christ and with one another;b they had experienced the illumination and power of the Spirit on a number of occasions, they had been specifically taught about the spirit, and had been promised God’s gracious gift of the spirit for themselves. Yet, although the spirit had clearly been with them before Pentecost, he was not abiding in them. His action had been as in Old Testament days coming upon certain people at certain times ffor certain occasions.
It was only at Pentecost that the prophecy of Joel was fulfilled, when God poured out his spirit ’upon all flesh’, sons and daughters, young men and old men, menservants and maidservants. ’For the promise is to you and to your children and to all who are afar off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him, ’From that moment on the church learnt to live and move and pray in the Spirit.
One way or another it bacame impossible to think of the church without the spirit. Take him away and you have no church, an institution, an organisation, a building, a structure perhaps, but no church of the living God. Yet Dr Carl Bates once commented, ’If God were to take the Holy Spirit out of our midst today, about 95 percent of what we are doing in our churches would go on, and we would not know the difference.’
The spirit is not an optional extra for the church, as though the church could jog along fairly happily on its own. The truth is that the church is totally dependent on the spirit, and it must be continuously sustained and renewed by the Spirit.
To be God’s property mean that we are owned by God. There is a powerful story about an English missionary whose house was being looted. "An English missionary died in the early part of this century [the 20th century]. Immediately after his death his former neighbors broke into his house and started carrying away his possessions. The English Consul was notified, and since there was no lock on the door of the missionary’s house, he pasted a piece of paper across it and affixed the seal of England on it. The looter did not dare break the seal because the world’s most powerful nation stood behind it". (Billy Graham
Let’s consider some of the foremost tasks of the church.
Guidance is the work of the Spirit of God,, ’for all who are led by the spirit of God are sons of God.’ Galations 5 16
Throughout every part of our personal and corporate life , we need to learn to "walk by the spirit"., be led by the spirit so that the fruit of the spirit may be increasingly evident in our lives.
A second task of the church is prayer - prayer also needs the direct assistance of the Holy spirit. We are to "pray at all times in the spirit; and if we are concious of our weakness in the realm of prayer. "The spirit helps us in our weekness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought but the spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. Ephesians 6:18 romans 8:26
A third task is ministry that is able to build up the body of christ is also entirely dependent on the Holy spirit. It is the manifestation of the spirit that is for the common good and thae various gifts of the Spirit in order to build up the church = 1 corinthians ch 12 4 - 11.
|Fourthly the really important task of the church is to witness to Jesus christ. Agsain no one finds this easy; and therefore Jesus promised to his disciples the power of the spirit in order to be his witnesses. Indeed as we read this morning - they were to stay put until they had been clothed with power on high Acts 1 verse 8 or Luke 24 - 49 During WWII, when Italy invaded Ethiopia, all Protestant missionaries were forced to leave the country. In one district there was a church of about 70. Some 5 years later when the missionaries returned, they found 60,000 Christians organized into fully indigenous churches. It was the work of the Holy Spirit!
Fifthly We are to worship God. But real worship is never easy - Jesus said:- 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." The mistake many made as they came out of the Charismatic renewal was that they wanted to grow more in worship without worshipping God in truth. In the end if you want to have good worship - don’t think so much about the means of worship - which prayers or instruments metres or chorusses to use but rather think about your lives in relation to the Truth of God. In other words do our lives in any way betray our worship. This calls us back to the primitive call of John the Bapitist on the banks of the Jordan where he calls people to prepare for the coming of God by cleaning up their Act - repentence.
"God is spirit" said Jesus "and those who worship him must worship in spirit and Truth. It is only the spirit within us that can genuinely cry out "Abba Father."
Sixthly compassion - We cannot possibly love this broken world with God’s love without his Spirit.
We truly need what has been comonly described as the Father heart of God this kind of love only comes when we open ourselves up to the warm reception of God’s love in our lives.
Cardinel Suenens once wrote - The church has never known a more critical moment in her history. From a human point of view, there is no help on the horizon. We do not see from where salvation can come, unless from HIM there is no salvation, except in his name. Yet at this moment, we see in the sky of the Church the manifestation of the Holy spirit’s action which seem to be like those known to the early Church. It is as though the Acts of the apostles and the letters of St. Paul were c oming into life again, as if God were once more breaking into our history.
How then can we personally and corporately know the power of the spirit here in our own church today.
The answers to that Question are in fact as old as Christianity itself.
LK 11:9 "So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever-- 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
The reception of the Holy spirit into our lives depends deeply on our asking God for him welcoming him into our lives.
Of course it almost goes without saying that because He is a Holy spirit it involves the confession of all known sin and a turning away from it - including those things that we have perhaps built into our lives for a long time and have refused to face.
The reception of the Holy spirit litterally changes lives
. Baptism" – Comes from the Greek word
- "Baptismo" which means to immerse or dunk.
Baptismo is a word which was used to describe:
a) Sinking ships as they sank water would fill
the inside of ship.
b) Another usage describes a garment being
immersed into dye… the dye penetrates every
fiber of the fabric.
So when Jesus and John The Baptist said, "You will be baptized in the H.S." they are saying :
-all your insides will be filled with the presence of God!
-when you are dipped, immersed, dunked into the presence of God you will have a new spiritual color that will fill every fiber of your being!
When Jesus received the Holy spirit at His baptism we need to understand that the Holy Spirit ’s character was revealed at that time -
Her descended upon the Lord Jesus at a dove.
There is no question that the Holy Spirit was and still is often received by the laying on of hands and prayer as we see in the scripture.
If you feel that the Spirit of God is far from you or if you feel you have never received him then can I encourage you to open yourself up to him this morning.
The Bible says, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts." How do I know if I am hearing his voice you say?
One time, I made a homemade kite. I used about a thousand yards of my grandmothers crochet thread for the string. I let that kite out as far as I could on that string. So far in fact, I could not even see it. But I knew it was there because I could feel it pulling on the line.
If God is there speaking to your heart today, you know it. He will pull on your strings of your heart. You may be experiencing a tugging of your heartstrings right now. Some have described it as a "want to." Don’t allow this moment to go by without saying yes to Jesus.
