The Six Elements Of The Spirit-Filled Life Series

Some of you know that last week I graduated with my doctorate. Thank you very much for the cards. But you may not know that I had to learn about the periodic table of the elements. In fact, I had to memorize the entire table. I don’t want that information to go to waste, so I thought I would share a little bit of my knowledge. The first question is how many elements are on the periodic table of the elements. There are 118 elements, 94 of which are from the earth and the rest of the 24 are synthetically made. The chemical elements on the table are made up of three parts. They are made up of the element symbol, the atomic number, and also the atomic weight. The element symbol is kind of a short hand instead of having to write out the entire word. We would use a C for carbon or an H for hydrogen or sometimes they would attack a lower case letter like Li for lithium. That is the symbol for the chemical element. The atomic number is a little bit more difficult to understand. The atomic number has to do with the number of protons contained within an atom of the element. Are you following me? A proton is basically a charged up particle. Of course, the atomic weight has to do with the number of particles contained within the nucleus of the atom. You are all very impressed I can tell. You shouldn’t be because everything I just told you I learned by watching a two-minute video yesterday on the internet. Fortunately, for me, my doctorate had nothing to do with the periodic table of the elements. Fortunately, for you, as we enter into this new sermon series, you don’t have to know anything about the periodic table of the elements, but it would be helpful to know the six elements of what we call the spiritual life. The more you know about it, the more you memorize it, the more you apply it, the more likely you are going to continue on your track towards Christ likeness.

Now for a little refresher. We began this summer by ending up an 11-week series that actually turned into 20 weeks that was called Learning to Live Everyday Life Like Jesus. It was a sermon series based on the Sermon on the Mount. In that sermon series, Jesus painted a picture of what he would call the kingdom life. He dealt with a lot of heart-related issues like lust and greed and judgement and lying and those types of things. Things that we had to work on in our heart. Things that, if they somehow would get in our way, could actually be detrimental to our discipleship growth. Jesus taught us a lot of things in the sermon. He preached a good sermon there. But as we know, Jesus was more than just simply a good preacher and a good teacher. He was somebody who modeled the kingdom life. He modeled a life that wasn’t simply reserved for some distant time in the future, but he modeled life that really was meant to be applied right in the midst of the current situation. Right in the midst of the chaos of everyday life. So if we are going to truly live like Jesus, we have to move beyond the Sermon on the Mount and begin to observe who Jesus lived his life and begin to imitate that life. Specifically, we crack open the gospels and we begin to look at how Jesus interacted with his Father and how Jesus interacted with others. Then we look at our own spiritual life, make a comparison, and hopefully begin to make adjustments so that our life begins to be more in line with the life that God intended for us. As simple as pie, right? Very easy to do. Unfortunately, it is not because if you open the gospels you know that Jesus had a lot of stuff going on. Jesus had a phenomenal spiritual life. A phenomenal three-year ministry. It is difficult to imitate what was going on there. The easiest thing to do is to break it down into some simple elements. I have chosen six elements that are really bite-sized morsels that we can trace back to the gospels and over time begin to train ourselves to begin to apply them to our lives. We are going to look at what I call six spiritual elements.

First of all, Jesus was God attentive. Secondly, he was compassion oriented. Third, he was sacramentally minded. Fourth, he was word centered. Fifth, he was spirit empowered. And sixth, he was sin resistant. These are the elements that we are going to look at. Granted, these are not all the elements, all the components, all the dimensions of Jesus’ spiritual life, but I really think if we begin to get a handle on some of these, at a minimum what we are going to do is begin to balance out our spiritual life. It is so easy for us and for individuals and even entire denominations to become kind of lopsided in their spirituality. That is our aim to help round out our spiritual life and really round out the spiritual life of the congregation. Over the next six weeks, I am going to unpack each one of these. The way I am going to do it is quite simple. Just simply go back and try to trace it again to the gospels to show that these elements are really part of Jesus’ spiritual life. Then what I would like to do is bring some historical examples or even contemporary examples or even people from the congregation today that seem to exhibit certain ones of these elements in their own life.